Operation Longhorn

SEATTLE – When it comes to its Windows operating system, Microsoft Corp. has been tarred as a monopolist and scorned as a copycat.

But the software company is betting billions that its new project, codenamed Longhorn for a bar in Whistler, B.C., will quiet critics and help build a different label: leader of the next technological revolution.

The project is the next version of Windows, which powers more than 90 percent of the world’s desktop computers. Still in its early stages, Longhorn is Microsoft’s “big bet,” as Chairman Bill Gates likes to say, for how people will use their computers a few years from now.

It’s also a big risk for the company as it strives to remake the cash cow that helped propel it from a small startup to the world’s largest software company.

As Longhorn moves from concept to code, the challenge looms: Can a company that openly admits it mistakenly ignored the Internet as a major phenomenon lead the next technological revolution? And more important, is anyone following?

“Microsoft’s control comes from its ownership of the desktop,” said Ted Schadler, an analyst with Forrester Research. “If it doesn’t create energy and excitement in the developer community and the partners and in the people who create tools for the desktop around where they’re headed, they’re in trouble.”

It’s more than just the technical aspects of inventing a new operating system that Microsoft will have to deal with.

The company needs to balance moving the industry ahead while supporting programs written for earlier systems. It needs to maintain developers’ and customers’ interest in the new platform, which some speculate may not ship until 2006 or 2007. And it needs to avoid raising suspicion by the U.S. government and the European Union that it is leveraging its dominant Windows platform to unfairly quash competitors. Microsoft is still fighting legal challenges over its past anti-competitive business practices.

For now, Microsoft is running high on energy and optimism. It showed off elements of its Longhorn platform to more than 7,000 developers at a conference in Los Angeles last month, netting enthusiastic feedback for the promised tools and capabilities, such as a unified way to store files, improved graphics, advanced technological plumbing and better security.

The idea is to help developers more easily write advanced applications that couple the connectivity of the Internet with the power of the PC to provide new automated services. For instance, interested in an application that will automatically schedule dentist appointments at mutually agreeable times? Click and get one. Want a program that will monitor a stock price of your favorite company and dial your cell phone if the price drops? Click and get that too.

“If there’s anything that we just proved today … (it is that) we are bold in our dreams,” Microsoft’s Group Vice President for Windows, Jim Allchin, said in an interview with The Associated Press after unveiling details of Longhorn.

But the revolution needs followers. Ultimately, the success of the operating system – and what the end user will see – rests in whether and what developers build for it.

“The operating system is going to be awesome and cool and wonderful and it slices and dices, but the reality is the applications will be the thing,” Allchin said. “I think we’re going to truly hit a spark of creativity that we haven’t seen for a long time.”

Many developers said they are excited about what Microsoft has outlined.

“Everything we’ve seen so far is so amazing,” said Igor Odnovorov, a principal software engineer with Boston-based software developer Phase Forward Inc.

Even those who say very little in Longhorn is truly revolutionary, are eager to develop software for the platform.

“Microsoft is doing what it’s very good at – taking existing ideas and technologies and implementing them in a way that finally makes them usable by developers and by everyday computer users,” said Jim Taylor, general manager, of the advanced technology group for Novato, Calif.-based Sonic Solutions, which develops DVD technology.