Coming next: Blackcomb, Longhorn and Yukon

Computerworld - Cliff Reeves, Microsoft Corp.'s vice president of marketing for the Windows .Net Server product management group, discussed the strategic direction for Microsoft's server operating system with Computerworld's Carol Sliwa. Excerpts from that conversation follow:

The target audiences for Microsoft's server operating systems:

• We take the enterprise and think about it being broken up into three sets of people who care about the server. And this is very honestly the way I talk inside Microsoft as well as outside. Three audiences:
  
• Knowledge workers. They're increasingly seeing the features as something that they use to ad hoc collaboration, sharing and so on.
  
• The application developer. We hope that they'll see the application development environment as rich and productive, and you'd hope that that will then lead them to target that same platform for deployment of the applications they're building.
  
• The IT pro. They're managing systems, they're deploying systems, they're keeping them up to date and so on.
  

Windows 2000:

Windows 2000 was aimed squarely at the IT pro. While there are always features for all of these audiences, I think it's almost like watching a searchlight moving around. It rotates in terms of emphasis. So Windows 2000 was aimed squarely at addressing scale, management, deployment features that the data center professional requires . . . It establishes us as a highly reliable, highly scalable system in that environment.

Windows .Net Server:

Probably the single biggest thing in Windows .Net is the focus on the developer. It carries the ASP.Net frameworks [which will] also be available for Windows 2000 for download, but this [operating system] will carry it native, and as a result, it's the default application server for the Windows environment.

Windows 2000 vs. Windows .Net Server:

Windows 2000 was six points for the IT pro, three for developers and one point for end users. I would say that Windows .Net [Server] is five points for application developers, three for IT pros and two for end users.

The successors to Windows .Net Server—code-named Longhorn and Blackcomb:

Whistler [the code name for Windows .Net Server] and Blackcomb are two peaks . . . There's a bar between two peaks called the Longhorn bar. Longhorn is just a cute name for . . . interim release. The timing of them will be exactly what you'd expect from major operating system timing. It takes us two or three years to get a serious release out. Longhorn probably couldn't be sooner than a year and a half, and it probably would be very difficult to imagine being much more than two, two and a half years from the Whistler server. [Blackcomb will be] about the same again.