NT Pragmatists strip Microsoft naked

1999-09-08

It’s official – the shiny outer surface of Microsoft’s marketing machine is no longer the basis on which organisations are formulating their IT strategies. Thank goodness for that.

According to a survey by the NT Forum, which showed 40% of respondents already beta testing Windows 2000, only 30% had any plans to upgrade to Windows 2000 in the next twelve months, relative to 80% last year. Do I need to repeat that, or did you catch the significance already? It is easy to speculate on what has caused this apparently slating turnaround. Is it Y2K looming higher than expected in IT managers’ eyes? Is it that the world is to adopt Linux wholesale, no longer needing the costly alternatives? Whilst the first question may be a factor, our sources tell us a far simpler story.

Lets work back from the answer, which may be stated quite simply: there is no one answer. Despite Microsoft’s attempts to the contrary, to tout NT as the only operating system that we would ever need, the reality always was, and shall always remain, quite different. Back in 1997, Microsoft missed its chance to kill off Unix once and for all, by demonstrating the scalability of NT. The audience were expectant: Wintel had already trounced the pretenders to the desktop throne and was widely expected to do the same to the server. Indeed, a significant number of IT strategies at the time were flying the Windows flag wherever they possibly could, and were waiting patiently for Microsoft to take over the rest of the world. However, in the end NT scalability failed to convince the sceptics, the media and even the end users. This was the beginning of the end for Microsoft’s buy once, use anywhere mantra.

More recently, the Internet and eCommerce have uplifted the fortunes of mainframe and high-end server manufacturers (see the related story on IT-Director.com). The mainframe market, which refused from the outset to just roll over and die, is being reborn. It is not currently a market which gives NT a look in. What is now clear is that we will need mainframes for the highest availability and performance, we will need mid-range servers for more affordable back-end processing. The scale goes all the way down to the embedded software devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. Each has its own specific needs and hence requires the most appropriate operating system support. The dream, held by IT managers and promoted by Microsoft, of a single OS running everywhere, has become sadly jaded. The nine versions touted for Windows 2000 (as reported here) are testament to this fact.

There is no one answer: this is coupled with the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to throw away existing technologies to replace them with the newest, best thing. IT Managers are becoming masters of the morass – pragmatists for whom the goal is to integrate the best of the old with the best of the new. Upgrading only when necessary, replacing when budgets allow, these folk have evolved to listen more to the needs of their business than the hype of the vendors. Microsoft are seen for what they are, as a software company with some good products which can fit into the overall IT portfolio of an organisation. And that’s just the way it should be – the question is now, how long before the Seattle giant accepts its place.

(First published 8 September 1999)