W2K no Y2K

1999-10-14

We were unsurprised (and a little relieved) to see Steve Ballmer’s expectation management concerning the end of year shipping date for Windows 2000. In our September article, Microsoft faces Hobson's choice for W2K, we expressed our concern about interim deliveries slipping with no apparent impact on the final release. The logic (and experience) suggested that either quality or functionality would have to be reduced, neither of which were acceptable options to the user community. Oh good, honestly prevails. We no longer have a fixed date for the product, but at least we can be comforted that the product will be reasonably stable.

Despite this, it seems that the prospective users of W2K are not champing at the bit for the new OS release. Gartner figures suggest that 70 percent of existing servers will not be upgraded until the back end of next year, when the second release of Windows 2000 is slated. There are several, obvious reasons for this, not least Year 2000 itself – few existing Windows NT users have a compelling reason to upgrade the operating system in the short term. The upgrade will involve significant reconfiguration of existing servers, and reconfiguration is the last thing that IT managers want to deal with early in the New Year. In our last article, we recommended IT managers not to jump early, but to wait and see what were the realities of Windows 2000 in terms of its stability and functionality.

The operating system market is likely to evolve significantly over the next six months. Gartner’s write off of Linux, for example, seems to contradict the fact that every day sees new vendors allying with the Linux community in one way or another. What seems truly strange in all of this is the continuing idea that there really is a one-size-fits-all operating system. Despite the fact that most IT departments have been running heterogeneous environments for the past twenty years, companies still tout themselves as “the one,” be it for hardware, operating systems or application software. The reality is, and will probably always remain, that there are twenty or so vendors whose devices and packages need to work with each other, now and in the future. This reality is the basis of middleware, EAI and indeed most of the eCommerce market. Ballmer himself confirmed this yesterday at the Planet 99 conference when he referred to XML as the glue “to stitch together work from different vendors”.

The world has moved on from “no-one ever got sacked for buying IBM, Microsoft“ or whoever. This is a fact acknowledged by the captains of the IT industry as they promote interoperability and standards. However they are still failing to walk their own talk. Windows 2000 has a place, as do a variety of other operating systems and thin server devices. To sit any one product on a pedestal is to deny the reality and the opportunity of using the best tool for the job.

(First published 14 October 1999)