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News source: ibelite.com
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"It's taking longer than expected," Bittman said, adding that the problems will have consequences for the succeeding Windows release, which is code-named Longhorn.

Rob Enderle, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group Inc., said he altered the Longhorn ship date on his product road maps earlier this year, as soon as he learned that it had been shifted from a minor to a major release. He said Microsoft's security and .Net initiatives, as well as the government's antitrust case, may also be factors in product changes and delays.

Enderle said he expects the Longhorn desktop operating system to emerge in the second half of 2004, with the server version to follow in mid-2005.

"Some [corporate users] were thinking they were going to wait for Longhorn because it was a minor release and 2003 seemed like it was relatively close," Enderle said. "Now it's slipped to 2004, and that's a long time to wait."

At Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference last fall, Paul Flessner, senior vice president of Microsoft's .Net Enterprise Servers, had said the company expected to ship Longhorn in 2003 .

But that statement was issued prior to the news that the Windows .Net Server would slip. Microsoft Vice President Cliff Reeves said last year that Longhorn probably wouldn't ship until 18 months to two and a half years years after Windows .Net Server's release.

Corporate users who may have been waiting for Windows .Net Server to take advantage of its Active Directory improvements may not want to wait. Even if the product ships in early 2003, they would be well advised to wait four or five months for the new features to stabilize, Bittman said, "What we'll generally tell clients is, if they're ready to deploy in the next three to four months, they should deploy with Windows 2000 rather than wait and bring in .Net Server when it's ready," Bittman said.

Gartner gives the Longhorn server operating system a 40 percent chance of shipping in 2004 and a 60 percent chance of shipping in 2005, according to Bittman.