Reports are starting to trickle out of trouble at t’Microsoft mill. One says it looks like there won’t be a new release of Windows for “quite a while”.
A Service Pack (SP) 2 for Windows XP — a set of patches and updates to the software — is “running a year later than Microsoft had targeted”. Instead of shipping by the end of calendar 2003, SP2 is now a Q3 2004 deliverable. Microsoft didn’t announce the date slip; instead, it came to light in an article on “service pack lifecycles” published to the Microsoft Web site on Friday. And Longhorn, the codename for the next version of Windows now, after supposedly being available next year, and then 2005, has no firm release date at all. What gives?