Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Waiting for Longhorn

April 29, 2004 | Comments: (0)

Waiting for Longhorn

TAGS: None

Some industry gurus are saying companies should wait to upgrade their desktops and laptops until after Longhorn ships.

That could be a pretty long wait.

In the past as hardware chased after software innovation and sometimes vice versa, systems were good for maybe three years at the outside. Today's thinking and budgets say Windows 2000 and XP and today's crop of Intel processors have a four to five year life expectancy.

John Jordan at CapGemini put this question to me this week:

"What enterprise-grade apps strain either Win 2000/XP or a 1-Ghz processor? Email? Word Documents? Spreadsheets?". The answer is none of the above, which in fact represent a huge percentage of work done on PCs.

On the other hand Longhorn will require new hardware to run Avalon graphics, better audio, as well as new security standards which will eat up lots of computer cycles.

Al Gillin, research director for system software at IDC says it's awfully hard to build and budget for an IT technology roadmap for products that have not been promised for a specific date.

"If a company is not using Windows 2000 or XP then they owe it to themselves to get onto those. They are so much better than a Windows 9x [Widnows 95, Windows 98] platform," Gillin says.

At the personal level, rather than the corporate, the decision may be a bit easier. How do you want to spend your next $2,000, on a new notebook or desktop system or on a flat panel, high definition TV?

Written by Ephraim Schwartz

Posted by Cathleen Moore on April 29, 2004 04:34 PM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: