NT 5.0 hits delays as Microsoft faces hurdles bringing OS to the enterprise zdnet.com
Just another brick in this particular wall.
"NT 5.0 is something Microsoft started talking about in 1993, saying they'd ship it by 1996," said an official with one major Microsoft OEM, who requested anonymity. "Now we'll be lucky to see [NT 5.0] by 1998."
Maybe there's some real or virtual linkage between NT5 and Mysterious Merced. The latter was originally supposed to ship in '97, I think. Will either arrive in this century? And now, for some new terminology:
"Active Directory is still not cooked," said one Microsoft Solution Provider who is testing the first beta. "There's still not much you can do with it beyond reading the documentation and trying to make sense of it.
"Active Directory is incredibly great slideware. It's giving our developers fits," he added. "Nothing really works."
Slideware sounds like a useful term for the inevitable slippery slope arguements that crop up from time to time, like John Donahoe's WSJ editorial about how antitrust enforcement would endanger our right to call Bill Gates a hairball. Not that that matters to me, Bill's my hero, you know.
Other factors impacting NT 5.0's schedule include the sheer size and complexity of the code. OEMs are telling customers to expect NT Server 5.0 to be approximately 26 million lines of code, depending on the final feature set.
Hey, it just shrunk a megaline from Jim Allchin's 27 million lines. Good for Microsoft!
"[Microsoft] talks about something as if it is a done deal, but then turns around and releases a buggy, incomplete product," said NT 5.0 beta tester Jeff Terinhoff, an IS manager at a West Coast financial company. "I want to see the technology come out rock-solid and stable."
The saga continues...
Cheers, Dan. |
