Microsoft is hard at work on a new breed of operating system, one designed to combine the best of the company's two worlds. In this context, Microsoft will diverge from the current trajectory of delivering a client operating system and a server operating system and will take to the less traveled path of offering a single operating system for both worlds. With Windows Vista available for the general consumers since January 30, 2007 and with Windows Server 2008, formerly codenamed Longhorn, scheduled for RTM by the end of this year, the Redmond Company has started looking to the future.

And the future is Windows Vista Server Longhorn. But the fact of the matter is that obviously this is not Microsoft's future strategy. The Redmond Company has "problems," in Apple's perspective at least, delivering a single version of its client operating system. Unifying the Windows client and server platforms is of course out of the question. There is however a certain degree of interaction between worlds. Windows Vista has at its core the fundamental architecture of Windows Server 2003, but Vista and Windows Server 2008 will never be more than joined at the hip.

Windows Vista Server Longhorn is nothing more than an error. Microsoft's press materials and download documentation of late have been crawling with such slips, from recommending Internet Explorer 6.0 for Vista to announcing the third service pack for Windows XP by the end of 2007. The image included at the bottom is a screenshot from the download page of Microsoft Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 Driver for Windows Vista (64-bit), but in fact all the other resources for v6.1 contain the reference. Just a little typo that can generate a perspective where Microsoft would in fact offer just one universal operating system, instead of the various editions of Vista and its server line.