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Understanding Microsoft's Platform Strategies
Making sense of Whidbey/Yukon and Longhorn in a .NET Framework world.
by Peter O'Kelly
Posted April 12, 2004
The product and strategy floodgates at Microsoft are currently wide open, with a deluge of releases late last year and the unveiling of detailed strategies for the next two waves of platforms and tools at its October Professional Developers Conference (PDC). It's important for enterprise IT planners to assess these product waves not only in the broader context of overall application platform evolution but also relative to Microsoft's .NET strategy, as these waves are much more significant than traditional product updates.
The first of Microsoft's two future product waves, expected during the first half of 2005, includes initiatives code-named Whidbey and Yukon. Whidbey represents version 2.0 of the .NET Framework and a significantly updated release of Visual Studio (Visual Studio 2005). Yukon is a major update of SQL Server (SQL Server 2005). Whidbey/Yukon and other Microsoft product releases planned for 2004 and 2005 will clarify and advance Microsoft's overall .NET strategy and will better position Microsoft to compete in the evolving application platform market landscape.
The second wave is focused on Longhorn, the code name for the next major family of Microsoft software products (scheduled to be shipped after the Whidbey/Yukon wave), beginning with a significantly enhanced Windows client. Time estimates for Longhorn's release vary considerably, although Microsoft is targeting 2006. It's not particularly useful to speculate about Longhorn's exact timing at this point, as the development project is currently in its alpha phase and its timing will become clearer over the next year.
Longhorn is something of a paradox. It represents both the culmination of the .NET platform strategy Microsoft unveiled during mid-2000 and a new, broad, deeply integrated foundation for future Microsoft software products and solutions. Longhorn can be considered an orderly and evolutionary step forward from Windows XP, but it can also be viewed as a dramatic advance in terms of developer and user conceptual models and core platform capabilities. Longhorn's market trajectory and uptake will remain difficult to project until Microsoft also unveils detailed plans for Office 12 and Green, the code names for the Office System and Microsoft Business Solution releases that will be optimized to fully exploit, and thus increase demand for, Longhorn.
In assessing Microsoft's next two product waves, it's clear that Microsoft is not alone in its strategy to innovate with a family of products that exploits open standards for interoperability and system-level integration while also unabashedly focusing on a tightly integrated and proprietary suite of platforms, tools, applications, and services for competitive differentiation.
Put the Product Waves in Context
This is the first in a series of Trends & Analysis columns that puts Microsoft's current and future product waves in context. The rest of this column is a survey of overall software market trends that apply both to Microsoft and to its leading competitors such as IBM, BEA, Oracle, and Sun. The second column in the series will revisit Microsoft's .NET strategy and evaluate Microsoft's 2003-2004 products relative to both the overall market trends and Microsoft's .NET vision. The third column will focus on advances in Whidbey and Yukon, and the fourth column will explore Longhorn relative to the framework established earlier in the series.
To get started with the analysis of the software market trends affecting Microsoft and its competitors, it's useful to categorize and consider the trends in terms of platforms, tools, applications, and services.
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