Molly Wood, senior editor of CNET.com, recently asked why people would bother to upgrade to Longhorn when Avalon and Indigo will be available to WinXP/2003 users, and WinFS has been deferred entirely. In her article, she concludes that "Windows is weak," leaving the door open for competitors to eat Microsoft’s lunch. It won’t be an easy sell, convincing people to give up XP for something new, but that’s the sell that Microsoft is hoping to make with Longhorn. As long as Microsoft is going door-to-door, hat in hand, why shouldn’t someone else beat it to the buzzer? On the one hand, providing early information about Longhorn helps to make Longhorn a product that better fits consumer needs. Microsoft’s decision to push WinFS back was predicated on the problem of enabling the transport of WinFS metadata in distributed environments. The fact that it was largely tied to one computer isn’t acceptable in the modern networked world, and alpha users told them that. Similarly, developers aren’t going to write to the WinFX API if it means their creation can’t run on the large installed base of Windows XP systems. Hence, Avalon and Indigo are available for older Windows versions.