14 DAY TRIAL // Announced, delayed, and countless times modified, by sending it to be thoroughly tested by the public, Longhorn is one step closer to commercial reality. Microsoft announced its intention to put together a team of bloggers that will have access to the ?prerelease" versions of the operating system; in exchange, participants will have to review the successor of XP.
The "recruiting" announcement was posted on the channels of Microsoft bloggers, and the well-known Robert Scoble, a famous character in the Microsoft landscape, has started to request nominalizations from ?Team 99" through the Channel 9 web-site dedicated to developers and patronized by Microsoft. The team mentioned before got its name from the highway that leads to Whistler, British Columbia, where you can find Longhorn Saloon.
Scoble announces that at first, the team will be composed from 20 persons, among which developers and "heavy weight" users. All the members of this campaign will be required to sign non-disclosure agreements, but because all of them have to be bloggers, the team will also serve as Longhorn's promoter, whose beta version will be launched this summer.
Still, the press reaction to Microsoft's intentions was not what the company was expecting, experts agreeing neither the number of participants, nor their origins represent the foundation of a good testing. The press brought into discussion the insufficient number of bloggers and choosing of the testers from among Windows enthusiasts which would have offered a better feedback and more useful information for the system's optimization.
Surprisingly, Microsoft's invitation comes only a few days after the company requested bloggers to remove the Longhorn screenshots from the sites. The company's reason was the possibility of losing patents for the applications that are being developed, but the general opinion was inclining more towards Microsoft's methods of blocking any information related to its products.