What does the future hold?

SKD over on the Wixs-Dev list recently asked a question of how long WiX will be around.
Anytime you include third party technology into a solution you have the issue of what is the expected life cycle of that technology. That technology could be an O/S, a language, an SDK or an application. So without getting caught up into open src / closed src there is the question of how long with WiX and MSI be supported. Robmen had a blog entry where he notes how long microsoft supports products once they are released and it's conclusion to me is that MSI will be around for a very long time. After all you have tons of applications dependant on it for setup. Now the better question to me is why release WiX now? Darwin has been out in the wild for close to 6 years now and Microsoft had until now stayed out of the setup tool game and played in the setup sdk game only. On one hand the fact that Microsoft is now releasing a setup development tool only reenforces to me how long MSI will be around.&n bsp; But then again I wonder what technologies will come with LongHorn and the DSI inititative that might become more appealing to me rather then investing more time in MSI/WiX. Sometimes I really wish there were more hours in the day for me to do more research in this area.