Microsoft Corp. has once again shifted the schedule for the release of “Longhorn,” the company’s next major version of Windows, leaving some users up in the air about an upgrade path.

Microsoft executives from Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on down have long described Longhorn as the Redmond, Wash., company’s most revolutionary operating system to date. The product was originally expected to ship next year. Then in May of this year, officials pushed back the release date to 2005. But now executives are declining to say when they expect the software to ship.

“We do not yet know the time frame for Longhorn, but it will involve a lot of innovative and exciting work,” said Gates at a company financial analyst meeting this summer. Since then, other Microsoft officials have neither retracted nor clarified Gates’ statement.

They have said that the next step for Longhorn will be at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles next month, where Longhorn developer preview CDs will be handed out. That will be followed by a broad first beta next year, said Jim Allchin, group vice president of Microsoft’s Windows Platform Group, at the same summer event attended by Gates.

Some Microsoft partners and customers said that they would welcome Longhorn delays and that there needs to be more time between major releases to allow Microsoft proper engineering time.

News Source: Eweek