Microsoft has said to the the website MicrosoftWatch that they're considering to make their future coming filesystem also compatible to Windows XP. Earlier the company had let known that Avalon and Indigo, the presentation- and communicationlayer of Longhorn, would be avaible for Windows XP and Windows server 2003.

WinFS is a special case, because the development of it takes so much time that it wouldn't be a part of Longhorn, that will appear at the end of 2006. The filesystem has to run on top of NTFS, and has to make the organising and re-finding of information easier.

The "porting" of WinFS, Indigo and Avalon is a way to give developers more possibilities on there current platform, but also to make future coming Longhorn-applications backwards compatible. But the availability of all the three big parts of Longhorn for Windows XP, could reduce the necessity to use Longhorn instead of Windows XP a lot.