This Microsoft Watch article by Mary Jo Foley and Matthew Rothenberg provides some preliminary (premature?) comparisons between the two unreleased OS's.
Anticipated Panther features are recapped, starting with rumors of performance boosts in the areas of launch, boot and log-in times. Other features borrowed from XP are also described:
- For features, Apple is burning the midnight oil to add capabilities that will rival Windows Terminal Services' access to multiple desktops, XP's ability to create profiles that travel with them among machines, and extensible help-system features that allow third-party developers to provide support and updates from within the OS. Add in such niceties as transparent, file system-level compression and encryption, and Apple has a sizeable task list in front of it.
The article also describes the anticipated features for Longhorn (due in 2005)... with some cues taken from Apple (compositing-video-interface) and advanced features such as "natural-language query capabilites".
With a target date of 2005, it seems that Panther comparisons are premature as Panther will be two years old by Longhorn's release.
