How high will Microsoft fly? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly?

MSFT 483.69

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3:59 PM EST

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To: Bearded One who wrote (20059)	4/8/1999 4:07:00 PM
From: RTev	of 74651

I believe the reason that the Windows 98 product line will continue is that Microsoft cannot get Windows 2000 to work correctly. I agree. There's no other reason to give up on a long-announced plan. Microsoft has been telling developers for years that they should focus on NT because that's the future. Many have spent a lot of money making their programs NT compatible even though the market for NT applications is fairly small. Some developers could have ignored NT and accepted bugs there since the big market was in consumer Windows, but Microsoft told them they shouldn't (and couldn't if they wanted a Windows sticker) do that because even the desktop would soon belong to NT. I suspect a few of them are now asking themselves why they listened. It's expensive even for biggest app-maker of them all, Microsoft itself. Applications must now be developed for and tested on at least three different versions of Windows -- NT4, Win2000, and Windows 98. It will take longer and cost more to get an application out the door because the developer will be faced with the challenge of making code work on two systems that are significantly different in too many ways. It becomes a particular problem when a developer wants to take advantage of new features in Windows2000 but still needs to sell into the desktop market to be dominated for years to come by Windows98. Microsoft knows the costs adding testers to handle multiple OSes. They know the statistics on compatibility bugs. If they could make a consumer OS based on the NT kernel, I'm pretty sure they would. We should all hope that they would not accept that extra cost and dilution of earnings of the double-OS strategy merely as a legal ploy.

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