Microsoft is famous for vaporware. A decade ago, merely announcing the intent to develop a product that was two years from shipping was enough to crash the competition. Today, it's not that easy, but Microsoft's marketing is still making it hard for current customers.
A case in point is the supersonic nature of the PDC 2003 hype for Longhorn and its attendant technologies. The press ate it up and made it seem like you would be deploying it Real Soon Now. While I feel the technology will be neat and make programming much easier, the marketing hype machine may have outstripped reality. Scoble is now forced to defend today's Windows Forms programming to keep ISVs from abandoning it and staying with VS6 era languages. Why invest in a dead technology?
The comments to Scoble's post are as interesting as his original text. From this hobbyist programmer's point of view, Longhorn is not only beyond the horizon, it is beyond it and way ahead of the bleeding edge. I have the PDC bits but never bothered to install them. I do not need to make that investment for several years. Learning WinForms now is more interesting.
It is somewhat distressing that there are significantly fewer MSDN articles of interest to me - 2002 was a banner year because the WinForms technology was still fresh then. Microsofties quickly became bored and in 2003 moved on to Longhorn as the next great adventure. The upshot from those of us on the outside is one of apparent disinterest. I say “apparent” from my point of view because MSDN is still cranking out articles, but they are more business oriented.
This retrenchment and acknowledgment of the hype is just another phase of the process. This form of self-flagellation will continue for a short while before the WinForms abandonment continues.