Longhorn concept was awesome. I remember how crazy and advanced this Longhorn promo was [this video] >Sadly, we all know how Vista turned out at the end. Maybe with the first versions, but after a few service packs it was really usable. Hell, Windows 7 was referred to as "Windows Vista SP3" :) But I do agree that Vista wasn't as Longhorn. I think they realized it was too demanding and too advanced so they decided to milk the concept ideas for later versions.
As a nice example, compare this ( [this video] ) to what shipped as Vista. And with Courier they are not even pretending it's a real shippable product.
I'm too young for Cairo, but I do remember Longhorn and WinFS, and indeed the marketing and ideas of those have shaped my view of what the systems could/should be today. Didn't BeOS also have some sort of object-database-filesystem-thingy? I remember some chatter about that, but didn't actually catch any first-hand experience at the time. edit: Longhorn concept video: [this video]
Longhorn concept video as example of Microsoft's vision
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