[link|mailto:jon_udell@infoworld.com;letters@infoworld.com|Jon Udell] writes:

The proof is still years away. But given the ambitious scope of the project, it's not too soon to consider how Longhorn will affect the vast majority of enterprises deeply invested in both Windows and the Web.

Yes, it is too soon for that.

What these as-yet-unwarranted speculations do is mainly to raise Microsoft's "mindshare" even more than their paid-for publicity already does, thus crowding out other systems that might otherwise have been serious alternatives, from CIOs' and other decision-makers' attention.

This is exactly what happened to OS/2 in the period from about 1990 to about 1995, as some of us took great pains to point out to the then-editor-in-chief of InfoWorld, Sandy Reed, in 1997 (in the aftermath of the magazine's scandalous decision to invalidate the readers' choice for that year's Readers' Choice awards)... But InfoWorld has apparently learned nothing (probably, in my estimation, because it didn't want to learn anything).

Where are all the InfoWorld articles speculating about, say, Linux' or MacOSX' capabilities two or three years down the line? Where are InfoWorld's grave exhortations that "it's not too soon to consider" what those systems will have (probably, possibly, hopefully -- according to the the most optimistic interests pushing them) to offer, at some unspecified future time, given some unspecified future implementation effort, at some unspecified future monetary cost? (No prizes for concluding that at least in the case of Linux, at least the last point will be lower than for Microsoft.)

I have to confess that since InfoWorld so eloquently showed how it valued its readers compared to how it valued the Redmond monopoly, I haven't read it regularly (or much at all, really). So it is of course possible that there are quite a lot of such articles -- which would certainly surprise me -- but if there are, that ought to be quite easy to demonstrate. Just give us a link to each archived article over, say, the last two years hyping "Longhorn", and a link to each article from the same period hyping the future prowess of, say, Linux, MacOSX, the *BSDs... and, why not OS/2? Compare and contrast the counts of links for each system; if the links are honestly selected, that should be quite an instructive exercise.

Microsoft couldn't get better publicity if they paid for it -- so it's no wonder some people think that's exactly what they do.

---

This grew while I was writing it; seems it developed into a letter to Udell and/or a "letter to the editor" to DisInfoWorld. (Anybody wanna bet whether it'll be published? :-)