It's Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day (by proxy), and what timing! Faithful viewer Xel was the first of many to tip us off to an article over at Microsoft Watch with the ominous title of "Microsoft to Gut Longhorn to Make 2006 Delivery Date." (Personally, we prefer the slightly more evocative imagery of The Register's "Avalon faces axe as Microsoft dismembers Longhorn," but to each his own.) You may recall an earlier installment of WO-TM-BD back in April in which we noted that Microsoft had already resorted to tossing features from the Longhorn spec in order to make it even remotely deliverable by its 2006 ship date, pruning some of the nicer features of its much-hyped WinFS file system. At the time we said that Microsoft was still "trying to decide what other highly-touted features to cut in order to hit that 2006 ship date."

Well, apparently they've decided, and sources claim that WinFS is out. Completely. And that's a pretty significant cut, since Longhorn is supposed to be a huge next-generation quantum-leap-forward version of Windows due to four major changes: WinFS, Avalon (a GUI/display subsystem that some have called a blatant ripoff of Mac OS X's Quartz and Aqua), Indigo (a communications layer), and a pack of fundamental new APIs for developers to build with. Now that WinFS is reportedly gone, Longhorn looks a little like a coffee table with one leg hacked off. Or is it two? Because Microsoft is also said to be "decoupling" Avalon from Longhorn, planning to make it run on XP as well someday. And come to think of it, Microsoft did the same thing to Indigo last year. So what, exactly, is left for Longhorn?

The answer? Not much. One source says that "Longhorn is going to stop being a whole new thing and more of an XP with a lot of good new stuff"-- which, frankly, sounds like the Windows ME strategy all over again. According to the article, with both WinFS and Avalon now hacked from the 2006 release, "Longhorn won't look much like the early builds that Microsoft has been distributing to date. But it should run existing applications."

"Run existing applications"? Can't... can't people do that now?

You know what? We're pretty sure they can. In fact, we think we saw someone doing it just a few hours ago. So we're not exactly sure what all the Longhorn hype is about.

But you want to know what's really sad about this whole Longhorn situation? It's that the operating system's feature set is getting pared to the bone just to hit this 2006 ship date, when until just last October Microsoft was swearing up and down that it would be out the door in 2005 at the latest. And as faithful viewer Miche Doherty reminds us, way back in October of 2001, Bill Gates swore on a stack of bibles 'n' nuns that Longhorn would ship in 2003. And while Microsoft did indeed hold a gala event last year celebrating Longhorn's completion (!), getting drunk don't make it so. Nice try, though.