I need to be clear about this, we're no longer being 'warned' about this, we're in the midst of a generational crisis caused by this.

You don't get Elon Musk, J.K. Rowling, Yoon Suk-yeol, Marc Andreesen and countless others in their reactionary incarnations without social media addiction. Period.

tapper is literally friends with scott adams

Sadly, counterfactuals are extremely difficult because there is little information on what MS planned before the August 2001 decision. I would be very happy to hear new information about that period if it emerged.

At that moment, this original plan for a minor release to follow up XP was dead. Longhorn would go on to become a development disaster and reset (although not completely since some components survived) in mid-2004.

(truncated the above again bc character limit)

(cont.)

"And Steve said, 'That means synchronizing the release.' And I said, 'Isn't that risky?' And Steve said, 'But isn't it obvious we should do this?'"

Ballmer made the decision to roll the dice at a senior-management retreat in August. It wasn't an easy one. BG recalls: We'd been talking about doing a lot of these things separately for a long time, but the mood was like, 'Hey, this incremental stuff is okay, but let's do something more dramatic.'

Instead of incrementally getting to the Blackcomb vision, Microsoft would instead effectively move the entirety of BC's featureset into LH.

web.archive.org/web/20021007...

www.theregister.com/2002/06/25/w...

So Microsoft had this plan. By August 2001 XP was about to be released to manufacturing and split from .NET Server (and possibly Longhorn, if builds were being compiled this early) What happened to it? Well, at a senior management retreat, Steve Ballmer proposed a new strategy.

As for the other two infamous 'pillars' of WinFX (later #.NET Framework 3.0) I have little idea of Indigo (WCF) but Avalon (WPF) was 100% in development at this point. I have no idea if it would have shipped with Longhorn or not, however.

Also notable is that Blackcomb has "Yukon" listed under it - the codename for #SQL Server 2005, which WinFS was very much connected to. Longhorn would have shipped with something codenamed "Mighty Mouse" instead.

www.instagram.com/p/CvA-j_CS_L4/

hal2020.com/2013/03/10/w...

But another detail you may have noticed is something called Express 2.0 that would have been a subset of LH, succeding 1.0 described as "AOL Competitive" and with "HailStorm". Some may know of .NET My Services, but it seems based on that and this that Express became MSN 8.

these screenshots do resemble each other quite a bit.

At this early stage, Longhorn's feature set was still in definition, but one detail stands out - "Mars/Shell integration". Mars was the codename for MSN Explorer, and well...

Very much truncated because of the character limit btw

Paraphrasing from PX06977, "feedback was we can’t afford to churn people twice, once at LH and BC. BC will be the big revolution, LH needs to be upgrade that users can move to w/o significant retraining, and that works with most apps. need to get clear on on roadmap, and how this culminates in BC."

One misconception I want to clear quickly is that Longhorn, even at this early stage, was not going to be a "Windows XP Second Edition". It would have still been very much a *new* release, think like Windows 7 or 98 compared to their predecessors and that's what Longhorn would have been to XP.

Planning for this started in earnest around May 2001, and this document is one of the only pieces of evidence as to what they wanted to do at this point: iowa.gotthefacts.org/011607/6000/...

Originally, #Microsoft intended to succeed #Windows XP with a major release codenamed "Blackcomb". They quickly realized the scope of the work involved would be far too large to complete in the desired time so some of it was put in a new interim release codenamed "Longhorn".