So lets just stay in the stone age then... (Score 1)

It appears that Mr. Vaughan-Nichols (e-week author) has no sense of imagination.
Maybe he is content with a seriously-ageing user interface, a file-system that hasn't really changed in decades, and a computer that behaves just like it does today, but a bit faster and a bit more stable.

I don't. I want:

• The coolest looking interface I can find. How can MS achieve this? By delivering a swathe of new technology. What 'industry standard' is there for super-cool, hardware accelerated user interfaces??? None. Hence Avalon.
• Not to keep manually looking for all my media files on my variousa storage devices with some (slow) explorer like program. I want a rich search engine for my desktop. How is google gonna help there?

And as for his decision that the Longhorn OS APIs will be closed, and communications proprietry - he obviously has no knowledge of these things. Everyone knows .NET can be decompiled (the Longhorn API is largely all managed code), and he has obviously never heard of Web services and all of the progress in the web services architecture area.

What a looser.