Vendors Tentative on Windows 2000

By Tony Baer

The Windows 2000 coming out party held just after Valentines Day in San Francisco came off almost as an afterthought. Although over 20,000 attendees were expected, actual turnout was barely a fraction of that. There were few if any vendor bashes that usually accompany breakout events. The headline was Michael Dell backtracking on his previous week's lukewarm comments on W2K, which triggered a run on Microsoft stock. The highlight? An unexpected Santana cameo performance after Bill Gates' keynote.

Like any Microsoft operating system, there's nowhere to go but up. Windows 2000 has huge promise to fulfill. If W2K ever delivers on the promises of mainframe scalability and reliability, Intellimirror remote desktop control, Active Directory policy-based management, or hot plug and play, that would do wonders for TCO. But getting there will be most of the "fun." Gartner Group's predictions of 25% of existing Windows applications having problems making the transition are probably conservative, as we've learned from previous experience going from 16- to 32-bit systems.

For the vendor community, W2K remains a blank slate. Sure, it's inevitable over the long term, but in the next 12 months, it's anybody's guess to where, how fast - or whether W2K will turn up.

For one, nobody was predicting when W2K shipments would surpass NT 4. There was similar lack of consensus on what will spark migration first-client or server. IBM expects most of the action on Professional, the client edition that succeeds NT Workstation, because of the hot plug and play and reduced incidence of blue screens. Dell expects servers to be the early focus of migration because of scalability and remote desktop advantages.

Where will those early installs be? It depends on who you talk to. IBM says it's the mobile client, which will be plagued with fewer blue screens of death. Dell says it's too early to tell whether most of the early installs will be on client or server. Data General, which has staked out the server high ground, naturally says the first installs will likely be server-based.

Although W2K is supposed to be scalable, there's no party line on the best way to scale. Not surprisingly, the answers are based on available product. Dell, which says it's not going to make machines larger than 8 CPUs, says high-availability clustering is the solution. Data General, which is staking out the high ground in servers, naturally says the opposite. And Compaq, not wanting to be caught flat-footed, signed an unusual OEM agreement with Unisys to supply 32-way boxes just in case Microsoft lives up to its promise to get Windows 2000 Data Center out before 2001 - the date when Compaq is to launch its new high end, Thinking Machines-like parallel architecture.

Just about the only consensus was that Active Directory - the engine of policy-based management - will be one of the last features embraced because it involves significant new functionality, and potentially, the most challenging migration issues.

Although there's nothing certain except death and Windows 2000, for something so inevitable, the vendor community was uncharacteristically restrained. Unlike Windows 95, 2000 promises real TCO breakthroughs and, of course, higher sales. But for now they're just promises.