Answer to question 2 "But if they, for instance, landed in the same month or something... Would Apple release Leopard before Longhorn is out, or would they hold off until Longhorn is out?":
Apple would probably do it first because people would see it first and it would cover up Windows release and people would go for it and forget about Windows. If it were the other way around Apple would be ignored in all the Longhorn news releases since Apple isn't the standard OS. So if Apple comes out on top and it is released before Longhorn then Apple will get a big chunk of market share if they play it just right. Also if it is announced early it will prove that Apple's team can get the job done on the time schedule that was promised and still have awesome OS features. This will win the press coverage.
That makes no sense. Apple isn't going to gain any marketshare by touting their OS over a Microsoft OS, period. Apple fans seems to think this is going to happen with every Mac OS release but it never does. Apple simply doesn't have the product line to steal marketshare from Microsoft and PC companies. In the last decade or so the only thing that has significantly increased Apple marketshare has been two hardware changes, the original iMac and the Mac Mini. The Mini looks like it may be short-lived if Apple keeps refusing to update it.
Apple releasing Leopard in the same month as Longhorn would be a disaster... for Apple. There's no way they're going to outshine a platform with a userbase of over 700 million users, period. In the month of Novemeber, Longhorn will sell more copies (pre-loaded, boxed, and free upgrades from manufacturers) than Apple has sold in their entire history of OS X.
Apple needs to release Leopard well after Longhorn. If they release in Feb. of 2007 then they'll be okay. Longhorn is going to RTM next summer andstart showing up pre-loaded on machines next October. By Thanksgiving it'll be everywhere.
It depends on how long Microsoft want to keep copying Apple. Longhorn is supposed to be what Tiger is today, so what Leopard is tomorrow is going to be beyond Longhorn. Longhorn could be pushed back to copy Leopard, but something needs to be done by M$. I figure that when Longhorn is released, it will be almost Tiger, with some unimportant flashy bits.
You're joking, right? Please don't let Steve's RDF encapsulate you completely. Jobs put up those Longhorn posters at 2004 WWDC because Spotlight was delivering fast search well before he figured Microsoft could. When Microsoft (and Google) released desktop search products in 2004 he looked stupid and that's why he did all that backtracking at MWSF 2005 in Jan. That's why he had to address "other desktop search" products and compare them to Spotlight. That's why they ditched those "Introducing Longhorn" posters.
If you play around with the Longhorn Document Explorer for two minutes you'll see that it's light-years ahead of any document managing (yes that means the Finder and Spotlight) in any other OS. The work they're doing with GPU acceleration is also far and away superior to what's in Tiger. Their notion of "resolution independence" is likewise greatly superior to Tiger.
Here are the slides from WinHec 2005 That's a hardware engineering conference where they basically laid out all the major features of the Fundamentals branch and Longhorn Server. Lots of things in those slides are kick-ass features. Longhorn Server Beta 1 will be publically (free) downloadable from Microsoft this month. It'll have most of those features implemented already. Apple has basically nothing to compete with the new fundamentals branch in Longhorn. QT7 and CoreXXX aren't going to cut it (they aren't even cutting it now).
Longhorn Beta 1 (client and server) is reported to be the most stable beta 1 product in the history of Microsoft. Beta 2 will be publically released before the end of this year so all the enthusiasts will probably be running Longhorn then. With Leopard probably not even being shown at all until WWDC 2006 (so they can counter and copy Lognhorn) then I'm willing to bet that
1. Longhorn RTM's well before Leopard. Probably about six to 10 months before.
2. Leopard won't have nearly the maturity that Longhorn will have at their respective releases (to be expected since Longhorn is 5 years in the making). Apple simply won't have the time to beta test and do QA if developers don't get their copy until Mid-2006. Tiger had almost a year of limited beta testing and it's still buggy as all hell. At best Leopard will only have 8 months (assumiing a Feb 2007 release). Longhorn will have been in
Public (as in anyone can donwload it for free with no NDA) QA/Beta testing for 15 months by the time it's RTMed next May-June.
3. Some kind of Longhorn-inspired Finder shows up at WWDC 2006, in addition to other Longhorn-inspired features.
4. That Apple loses marketshare due to the painful Mactel tranistion.
5. That Apple isn't going to show anything in Leopard unitl after they've seen Longhorn Beta 2.
