Microsoft shocks world with Vista, Office, Longhorn betas

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 24 May 2006 04:35

Your IT - Home IT

In what has come as a complete surprise to the global IT users community, Microsoft has released beta 2 versions of its 3 main product lines, Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Longhorn, its Windows server product, indicating an increasing air of urgency at the company.

The move, announced by Bill Gates at WinHEC 2006, Microsoft's conference for hardware engineers being held this week in Seattle, has come as a complete surprise to analysts, given the fact that the commercial release of Vista and Office 2007 is at least seven months away, while Longhorn is not expected for another year or more.

It is the first time that Microsoft has simultaneously released the test versions of all three of the company’s flagship products and highlights the urgency the company feels to get the long awaited products to market. Unlike previous occasions, when major product releases were in the pipeline, Microsoft is under serious pressure from competing sources. Growth in Microsoft's two main money spinners, Windows and Office has slowed to a crawl, while open source alternatives gain traction.

Microsoft has also been caught napping in the area of virtualization, only just announcing yesterday that it is bringing out a hypervisor product code named Viridian, which will not be available commercially until 2008. Hypervisor is a virtualization technology which enables multiple operating systems to run on under-utilised servers. Both EMC-owned VMWare and open source project Xensource have hypervisor products on the market.

Gates spoke before before a crowd of over 3,500 hardware technologists and business planners in a demonstration of the company's vision for the future of its new products and how they will fit in with the PC and server hardware environment.

“The release of these three betas is a significant milestone for Microsoft and a major step toward delivering the platforms that will drive the next decade of computing,” Gates said. “The combination of these innovative platform technologies and the new hardware and software being developed by our partners will make PCs and other devices more powerful, more useful and more intelligent for businesses today and into the future.”

In his keynote address, Gates formally delivered the first beta 2 copies of Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Windows Server “Longhorn” to Alan Nunns, general manager of information technology and strategy for oil company Chevron, one of the customers conducting early deployment and testing on all three platforms to hundreds of desktops and servers.

“Chevron employees in over 180 countries use a standard set of Microsoft products for business productivity,” said Nunns. “With the next generation of the Windows platform, we will leverage the new capabilities of Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Windows Server ‘Longhorn.’ The new platform is an important part of our integrated plan to improve the management of information across our enterprise. The energy business is a knowledge-intensive business. Our people need great tools and processes to gather information and collaborate so that they can make the best business decisions.”

Windows Vista Beta 2 and Windows Server “Longhorn” Beta 2 are available now to developers and IT professionals with MSDN and TechNet subscriptions, as well as to members of the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) and the TechBeta program. In coming weeks, Microsoft will start the Windows Vista Customer Preview Program (CPP) to allow developers and IT professionals who are not a part of those programs to obtain the code and begin their own testing. Also as part of the CPP, Microsoft will invite a broader group of technology enthusiasts to receive a build of the operating system to begin testing the various consumer scenarios that Windows Vista enables. WinHEC attendees will receive DVDs of the Windows Vista and Windows Server “Longhorn” Beta 2 releases. The 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2 is available via free download in English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish languages here.