A trace of panic is beginning to surface in Redmond, Washington, US PC Week seems to detect. The twin worries are identified as what is now clearly a very slow take-up of Windows NT, and the looming threat from Taligent Inc, which is coming down to the wire with its first products. Microsoft’s response appears to be to hasten the development of Cairo as an object-oriented follow-up to NT. In a recent round of presentations to customers and partners, Microsoft officials have revised development schedules for Cairo, which now follow closely on the heels of Chicago, the next major revision of Windows, which is due in mid- to late 1994. Cairo code is now operational in the company’s labs, and beta testing is planned to begin in the first half of 1994, sources briefed by Microsoft told the paper. Microsoft would like to launch Cairo as early as the end of 1994, but sources said that the first quarter of 1995 is more realistic. Taligent is said to be planning to begin previewing its technology – including foundation class libraries, the user interface, and the operating system itself – at Comdex in November. Cairo will be offered in client and server versions, and is seen to be steadily subsuming technologies and products that were once planned to be offered on a stand-alone basis. The project to develop a groupware product code-named Delphi has now been folded into the Cairo development group, and Object Linking and Embedding 2.0 development, initially part of Microsoft’s applications-development effort, was moved last this month into the Cairo group, the sources told PC Week – and many developers from the NT team also have been reassigned to the Cairo project. Cairo is also expected to include Silicon Graphics Inc’s OpenGL three-dimensional graphics technology will become part of the Win32 application programming interface by the time Cairo arrives: Microsoft licensed the technology from Silicon Graphics, but has not publicly said what it plans to do with it. With Chicago due next summer, that challenges us to do an NT update by the end of the year or early 1995, said Doug Henrich, group manager of developer relations for Microsoft. But critical issues are said to be still outstanding in Cairo, particularly with the underlying object model. It is based on a distributed version of the Component Object Model of Object Linking and Embedding 2.0, but does not yet fully define class libraries, frameworks, and how objects are to be re-used. Chicago and Cairo will share a common visual interface, but Cairo will implement an object file system underlying the Windows user interface for the first time.
