OK, like most of you I had supposed that Longhorn was going to be an actual OS to be released and sold - probably under the name Windows 2007 or something like that. Microsoft probably believed this as well, I would wager. Anyway, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, it is in fact "a wave of technologies, rather than a single product". What does this mean? Well, basically it means that there will be another release of Windows XP, some time in the middle of next year, with a new OS arriving in the following year. Both will contain these "longhorn" technologies, but not WinFS, which probably won't make it until the next version of Windows after that, code-named Blackcomb.