Following the announcement that Microsoft lost the EU appeal against removing Windows Media Player from it's Windows XP operating system, what is Microsoft planning for 2005?
It's not yet clear whether work has begun on removing Windows Media Player from XP but if work is planned to start in the New Year then this could significantly delay Longhorn, again. Depending on how Microsoft chose to remove Windows Media Player they may need to recompile different sections of the operating system to ensure there is no shell integration of WMP whatsoever. Changing an operating system and ensuring it has hot fix compatibility may require an external beta test to OEMs and partners. It's a big job and one that will inevitably slow down Longhorn progress.
On a bright note 2005 is the year for Windows Server. Last week I sat down with Mark Tennant (Windows Server Product Manager). Although we joked about WinFS (which should be code-named Hokey Pokey) and I fumed about anywhere access being removed from R2; it still seems that the Windows Server team have a lot of things going on in 2005.
Perhaps most significantly in the first half of 2005 we'll see the first Service Pack released. Taking a lot of security improvements from XPSP2, it aims to deliver increased reliability, scalability, security and performance. According to Mark "From our internal tests we're seeing 20% more users for ERP business applications, 50% more users per server for Terminal Services."
At around the same time we'll see the Windows Server x64 editions available. "Our approach here is to provide low-cost, high volume 64-bit computing with our partners to a broad segment of the market. Again we're seeing some big performance improvements in some of the traditional windows workloads (Web Servers, File and Print, Terminal Services) as well as customers running their existing 32-bit apps on the x64 platform."
In the second half of 2005 the team will release Windows Server 2003 "R2" and Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition. "This will see us supporting high performance hardware and related industry standards such as MPI-2 and RDMA over Ethernet and Infiniband, as well as MPICH".
Windows Update Services is the highly anticipated and highly delayed replacement to SUS (Software Update Services). Currently SUS is lacking in terms of functionality but 2005 looks to be the year that WUS will finally make its debut in the first half.
Keep your browser firmly on Neowin.net for the latest Windows Server news in the new year. May I take this opportunity to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
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