After insisting last year that it would not release a version of Windows client before Longhorn, Microsoft is now considering such a plan.

Company officials acknowledged on Thursday that the company is considering some kind of an interim Windows release that would follow Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).

SP2 is due out by mid-2004, Microsoft officials have said. Longhorn isn't due until 2006 at the earliest.

"We are looking at different ways to deliver improvements on Windows XP," acknowledged Greg Sullivan, lead product manager for Windows client. "We are not working on an interim release of Windows before Longhorn, but it is one of the options on the table, along with out-of-band releases, service packs and updates."

The range of different options for delivering Windows features, post Windows XP SP2, is code-named "Windows XP Reloaded," Sullivan said.

Sullivan said Microsoft would not have any update on its plans for refreshing Windows until after SP2 ships.

One developer close to Microsoft, who requested anonymity, said that Microsoft is considering an interim update because Longhorn has officially slipped until 2007. Sullivan would not comment on the Longhorn ship date.

Sullivan maintained that the fact Microsoft is considering an interim update is nothing new. However, in May last year, Microsoft execs said there absolutely would be no interim Windows release between XP and Longhorn. Will Poole, senior vice-president of the Windows Client Division, said at the company's annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference that there will be no interim Windows desktop client OS release before Longhorn ships, as a number of developers had claimed.

Such an interim release, nicknamed by some inside and outside of the company as "Shorthorn," was to be a modified version of Windows designed to provide customers with fixes and features that would tide them over until Longhorn debuted.

Read Poole's Lips: No New Windows Before Longhorn

Earlier this month, market analysts at the Gartner Group research outfit predicted Microsoft would release an interim Windows update by late 2005, and that the full-fledged Longhorn release — featuring the WinFS file system and all the other component parts that Microsoft outlined at the Professional Developers Conference last October — would not hit until 2007 or so.

Gartner cited Microsoft's Software Assurance licensing program as the impetus that would force Microsoft to deliver a new Windows release by 2005 at the latest. Without such a releases, customers wouldn't feel like they are getting the kind of value they expected under Microsoft's annuity-licensing program, Gartner and others claimed.

When contacted for comment on Gartner's predictions in mid-February, a Windows client spokesman said: "Nothing has changed on our end — there are no plans for an interim release of Windows at this time."

If Microsoft does release an interim Windows update, its entire Longhorn schedule will be impacted. Microsoft released an alpha version of Longhorn to testers at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) last October. Many developers have been working with the alpha code, assuming that it represented Microsoft's next release of Windows.

Microsoft had promised to deliver its first Longhorn beta this fall. Inside sources claimed earlier this month that the company had already frozen the Longhorn feature set.

Thursday's admission is the latest of a growing number of Windows statements of direction that Microsoft has had to revoke over the past year.

Last year, Microsoft officials reversed claims that the company would not release a Longhorn server designed to synch up with the Longhorn client. Microsoft now says that there will be both a Longhorn client and server. While company officials have said that Longhorn client is due to ship in 2006, they have offered only vague pronouncements of 2007 or later as to the anticipated Longhorn server release date.

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