So the news came out Friday of last week that Longhorn is officially scheduled for release in 2006. Most people expected as much, but that wasn’t the “interesting� part. The “interesting� part is that Microsoft has decided to release Longhorn without WinFS, the vaunted new file system that was supposed to give users an easily searchable file system, so you would no longer need to remember where you put things.

While WinFS is definitely a “nice to have�, it’s not on my list of things that I need my OS to do. LookOut or X1 or any number of other utilities can take care of that for me.

To be honest, as a regular computer user, there’s not much that Longhorn is supposed to do that I am at all excited about.

Windows 98 could do almost everything I need a computer to do, except it wasn’t stable. In fact, my parents are currently running on Windows 2000, and are totally happy with it. They were happy on 98, and I had to force them to upgrade to a more stable OS when they got a new machine a few years ago. Will they want Longhorn? They don’t even want XP.

My biggest complaints these days are performance related, and if Microsoft is true to form, Longhorn won’t be giving us any performance improvements, when compared on the same hardware with XP. Is there enough in Longhorn that truly enhances the user’s computing experience to make the performance hit worth it? I seriously doubt it.

I’ve done all of the performance optimization that I can on my current machine, including turning off unneeded services, and the tips provided here, and I still feel like XP is just well, sort of sluggish. This computer, an Athlon 2200+ with 512 Megs of RAM doesn’t feel appreciably faster than a 300 Mhz Celeron machine I have at home with 196 Megs of RAM running Windows 98. Why is that?

While I’d never advocate using an older operating system, I find it frustrating that at the breakneck speed at which hardware performance improves, upgrading to the latest version of Windows virtually guarantees you will see similar if not poorer performance than you did on the previous OS.

MS, you don’t need high-end processors and video cards to make Windows look better than the Fisher-Price look it currently has. There’s nothing I hate dealing with more than Mac zealots, but when they argue that OS X looks better than XP, I find myself looking at my toes.

Come on, Microsoft. Improve the user’s experience by making an OS that can keep up with its users. If you’re really “betting the company on Longhorn”, you might want to figure out what Longhorn is supposed to be all about.

What’s scary is that I’m a Microsoft fan and I feel this way.