September 1, 2003: Longhorn Ship Date Slips Again

While Apple has been coming out with regular OS X updates since 2000, Microsoft has been promising a major revision since roughly the same time. The constant delays of Longhorn gave Mac lovers a reason to snicker at the Redmond giant (apparently they had forgotten about the never-to-be-seen Copland) and even provided marketing fodder when Apple preintroduced Tiger.

The problem of the delays was typified when the news came that ship date targeted for Longhorn had slipped yet again:

"Microsoft executives from Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on down have long described Longhorn as the Redmond, Wash., company's most revolutionary operating system to date. The product was originally expected to ship next year. Then in May of this year, officials pushed back the release date to 2005. But now executives are declining to say when they expect the software to ship."

Bill Gates remained optimistic:
"We do not yet know the time frame for Longhorn, but it will involve a lot of innovative and exciting work.."

Longhorn slipped yet again (and not for the last time) this week in 2003.