So how are you enjoying Panther? It's a solid upgrade from Jaguar, isn't it? Which was, in turn, a pretty massive improvement from Puma, which itself built solidly on Cheetah. And wouldja believe that we've gotten all this Mac OS X-y goodness in just three short years? Meanwhile, if you bother to concern yourself with such irrelevant trivia, you already know that Microsoft's next major version of Windows after that XP thing is codenamed "Longhorn," and that after pushing a gloriously unrealistic ship date of 2005 for the longest time, the company finally admitted that it won't ship until 2006-- at the earliest. And by then we'll be up to Tiger at least-- probably even one cat beyond. Wheeeeee!

And in keeping with our traditional Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, it turns out that in order to ship Longhorn before mankind is reduced to a source of mute slave labor for talking apes with guns, Microsoft has taken to ripping a bunch of features out of the spec list. Faithful viewer Frank Davis notes a BusinessWeek article which reports that Microsoft is now targeting a Longhorn release in the first half of 2006, and in order to have half a prayer of meeting that schedule, the company has "cut some of the most far-reaching pieces of Longhorn"-- pieces like the brand new database-centric file system, which really did sound kind of cool; apparently the Longhorn version is no longer expected to "extend to files shared over a corporate network." And reportedly Microsoft bigwigs are even now huddled in smoke-filled rooms trying to decide what other highly-touted features to cut in order to get Longhorn out the door two years from now.

Now, in the interest of fairness, we're not going to pretend that Mac OS X didn't face the same sort of struggles. Remember, NeXTSTEP was bought in 1996, and we didn't get Mac OS X until 2001; Apple kept moving the release date along the way, and constantly changed what technologies were going to be included in which developer releases. The product mutated about a zillion times before it finally shipped. (Remember when it was going to be called "Rhapsody" and it was definitely going to be available for Intel's Itanium?) No matter how many times Apple redefined the finish line, by March of 2001 Mac OS X was super late by any sane person's standards, and by the time it finally hit store shelves, a whole bunch of intended features had been left out-- little things like, um, CD burning, DVD playback, and working volume keys. So yes, Mac OS X seemed pretty darn unfinished in its 10.0 release, and didn't really feel "done" to us until at least 10.1-- more likely 10.2.

And yet, none of that is going to stop us from pointing at Microsoft's Longhorn woes and giggling like maniacs on nitrous; just because we understand Microsoft's rescheduling and dropping features doesn't mean we can't get a big, goofy grin every time we think about it. If Apple's OS developers keep firing on all cylinders, whatever version of Mac OS X is shipping two years from now may be so far ahead of whatever Longhorn turns out to be, even random shmoes might find it obvious when they reach for the plastic. Fingers crossed.