Longhorn is the place I think Linux and OSX will really begin to gain much more momentum. After such a long time between releases, and with, to our current knowledge, not much in the way of great features, Longhorn will be the OS people won't want to upgrade to.
And with the
rumoured system specs, I'm betting some people won't be able to handle the upgrade...
The list of features we know is rather sparse...
IE 7? It'll run on XP, and Firefox is better anyway. (Offtopic, sorta:
)
WinFS? I believe they ditched that.
Avalon/Indigo? Weren't they going to have these backported to XP as updates?
A new GUI design? Wow, yeah, that's worth several hundred dollars, or a new computer (if you can't handle the sys requirements).
Basically, why should anyone upgrade from XP? And why wouldn't they just upgrade to a Mac (if they'd have to buy a new computer for Longhorn, no harm done), or upgrade to Linux (say
Ubuntu or
Kubuntu - both very easy to use).