If the internet historians are to be believed, Longhorn was pretty innovative for its time because Microsoft gave their devs free reign and let them go crazy with it to put all their ideas into the new OS.
Which was cool for show but apparently turned Longhorn into "the car Homer Simpson designed"[1], being plagued by endless cost overruns, constantly changing requirements, deadlines missed, a release date with no end in sight, and a codebase nobody could prune to turn into a solid shippable product, forcing Microsoft to scrap it completely and start over from scratch to create Vista in a ungodly short amount of time just to have something to ship to replace the now ageing Windows XP.
As what was supposed to be Longhorn was schedules to release just 1-2 years after XP but due to the Longhorn development fiasco, a half-baked Vista launched a whopping 6 years after XP, which was an eternity in tech back then.
Yeah, Microsoft really blew it with Longhorn and Vista, they tried to kill too many birds with one stone and ended up loosing all the birds and the stone. One wonders what Longhorn could have been if they hadn't messed it up from the start.
Yeah, going all-in on WinFS, DWM, and .NET is a big risk budget. I remember people theorizing that Vista (and later, some Mono-heavy revision of GNOME) were slow because of using .NET to replace C++ apps, but I don't remember if it was proven or not.
Which was cool for show but apparently turned Longhorn into "the car Homer Simpson designed"[1], being plagued by endless cost overruns, constantly changing requirements, deadlines missed, a release date with no end in sight, and a codebase nobody could prune to turn into a solid shippable product, forcing Microsoft to scrap it completely and start over from scratch to create Vista in a ungodly short amount of time just to have something to ship to replace the now ageing Windows XP.
As what was supposed to be Longhorn was schedules to release just 1-2 years after XP but due to the Longhorn development fiasco, a half-baked Vista launched a whopping 6 years after XP, which was an eternity in tech back then.
Yeah, Microsoft really blew it with Longhorn and Vista, they tried to kill too many birds with one stone and ended up loosing all the birds and the stone. One wonders what Longhorn could have been if they hadn't messed it up from the start.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPc-VEqBPHI