I've watched some good demos and concepts come out of Redmond the past few years, climaxing in the presentations at the Professional Developers Conference in 2003, held by Microsoft to introduce Longhorn.

At the conference, Microsoft showed off the pillars of Longhorn: Fundamentals, Avalon, Indigo, and WinFS. Each of these technologies played a key part of Longhorn, and each can be summed up below.

• Fundamentals - This is essentially what Microsoft did with Windows Vista: clean up the structure of the operating system and make it more secure. Nothing truly revolutionary can be found in this category, like ditching the NT kernel or trashing the registry, but in its own respect, this is a very important category. Everything from improved access permissions to parental controls to inherent malware protection was needed, and yes, they did come through on this one.
• Avalon - Now known as the Windows Presentation Foundation, this technology is supposed to enhance graphics in applications by using vector-based graphics and easy .NET code to integrate graphics and animation into a developer's program. WPF was used in the new Office 2007 suite of applications, and can be found in some other applications like the new Yahoo! Messenger and Microsoft Max. However, for some strange, odd reason, Microsoft didn't really use much WPF in Windows Vista; however, Longhorn demos really relied on it being heavily used in the OS. The Sidebar's graphics, Preview Pane Aurora, Desktop Aurora, and parts of Windows Explorer all used Avalon, but even though WPF (as part of .NET 3.0) is built-in to Windows Vista, no dice.
• Indigo - Now known as the Windows Communication Foundation, we haven't heard much from the Indigo camp for a while now. In the Longhorn tech demos, Indigo was used to unite Outlook with phone and instant messaging applications and integrate information securely across networks. In Windows Vista, the only application to actually utilize the WCF code is Windows Meeting Space, which is a big letdown because it was a driving force behind all that was good with the Longhorn sidebar.
• WinFS - Extensions to the NTFS architecture that allowed relational databases to better organize information on the system level, WinFS was the biggest letdown of Windows Vista, ditched because of performance reasons (and rightfully so: that's what you get for building a core system technology off SQL Server). The power of WinFS to organize and integrate information was, arguably, the best part of Longhorn and the power behind the Information Worker enhancement revolution that was the vision of Longhorn.

Now, as to that video, here's a synopsis of the detailed features that they failed to cover:

• Search (and Stacks) - Yes, but no. While Vista does organize information in that way, it's not quite that fast and virtual folders aren't as powerful as originally intended, nor fully utilized within the system. Also, this was supposed to utilize WinFS, but since it doesn't, we lose out on a lot of functionality.
• Sidebar - Now THIS is a joke. The current "gadgetbar" being shipped with Windows Vista doesn't even compare to a tenth the power the Longhorn sidebar had, from Indigo CRM to Avalon graphics, the Longhorn sidebar was a force to be reckoned with.
• RSS - Yes, but no. There was a lot more system-wide RSS that was supposed to be integrated but got dropped for various reasons. However, IE7 did deliver on RSS and so did the Sidebar, but not as well as we had hoped.
• Animated Thumbnails - Not only have I not seen anything of the sort in Vista outside of DWM Live Previews, but this can hardly be called a substantial reason why Vista would be fulfilling the dream of Longhorn.

So, sorry Microsoft, but while Vista is great, until you deliver Longhorn, you're going to be criticized in every new Windows release.