Q&A Part 2: Flessner on Microsoft's product road map

He talked about upcoming products, integration and R&D

By Carol Sliwa

June 4, 2003 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - DALLAS -- Paul Flessner, senior vice president of the Windows Server System division at Microsoft Corp., laid out a product road map in his keynote address this week at the TechEd 2003 conference here. He later discussed delays in the release of SQL Server (see story, Part 1) and discussed the company's product direction during an interview with Computerworld. Excerpts from the interview follow.
You showed a slide that referenced the Windows release code-named Longhorn in 2005 and "Windows Server vNext" in "2006+." What's the story with vNext? No code name.
It could be Longhorn, or it could be its successor, code-named Blackcomb? We're still sorting through what we're going to do. The server team has just spun off of [Windows Server] 2003, and we don't expect another server release for three years. It's taking us three years to do these things now, and we're going to have value off cycle.


Paul Flessner of Microsoft

So the server release could have the Longhorn kernel or it could have the Blackcomb kernel? It'll be a kernel. The code names don't mean anything. They kind of blur together. Whatever we do, we'll have Longhorn changes in it. And whether we call it "Longhorn" or "Blackcomb" is kind of irrelevant at this point.
To summarize, you're saying that the client operating system and the server operating system won't come out at the same time, and the server code name is undetermined. Yes. And they may decide, "Hey look, we want to ship something with the client because we need some feature in the server." So I wouldn't rule that out. I think the team needs a little time to sort through it.
Microsoft recently introduced a new name for its enterprise server software -- the Windows Server System. How do you feel about the new name? Were you involved in that decision? Oh yeah. A long, painful process. Names are the worst, just the worst. So emotional. We were going to go with a creative name, which was so counter-Microsoft. In the end, we just couldn't pull the trigger. ... I wasn't crazy about it. I like this much better.
Your division will be making a $1.7 billion investment in research and development during Microsoft's next fiscal year, which starts on July 1. How much was spent last year? We're about flat year to year. Microsoft does $5 billion of R&D a year. I [was at] $1.7 [billion] last year and [will be] going forward in the next fiscal year as well. We've upped

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