Why do they plan that far ahead? That's the nature of software and milestones.

I remember when I worked as a lowly coder that we had a set of features for this release and a room or two or three planning on what features our clients wanted in the next release and then debating what was "acheiveable" by the next due date.

We'd have a shipping party usually on a Friday that was always a brunch. We'd come in and the place would be full of Krispy Cremes and St. Louis Bread CO. stuff (that's Penera Bread for all you smucks outside of St. Louis) and then we'd order IMO's for Lunch (That's St. Louis for Pizza for again said smucks). We'd eat, drink, (being merry was not tolerated by company policy) until about 2PM and then go home. We'd usually get Monday off too, but Tuesday it was back to work answering tech support questions and bug fixing.

The first of the next month, we'd already be into the planning stages of the next release to be rushed out in another 6 months.

So planning like this isn't too uncommon especially on larger applications. I mean the stuff we were doing had 6 full time coders and maybe 150k lines of code. Imgaine something will millions and milllions and millions of lines of code. Sometimes the planning stages took longer than actual production.

BUt that was for a small company that no longer exists today. Anyway....back on topic....

The general consenses on WIndows today is that any major improvements will require a jump like Mac OS 9 to OS X: a complete rebuilding almost from scratch. Which is something MS might be considering. Now it would be something if they chose something like OpenBSD as their starting point and worked from there. Which under the BSD licenses they are free to do. Infact the Windows NT line of products include more than a few lines of BSD code in them already. (like the IP stack if I remember correctly)

But Windows copy Macintosh? No....never...

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