Longhorn, once upon a time the intermediate point release on the way from Windows XP to Blackcomb, the real big one, is now not-a-point-release, but is instead "a radically new version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, which, if all goes well, will come out sometime after 2005," John Lettice writes . Much about Microsoft's wondrous OS roadmapping procedure beggars belief, but this one raises the bar (as they say in Redmond) on beggary. We're talking about the next major rev shipping in 2006 earliest, which given commercial realities would mean a rollout in Q2-Q3 2006, which means a gap of getting on for five years from XP to Longhorn, which means we're likely to have not one but two point releases between now and then.

And here's why