Interesting article.
jww
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Windows 2000 beta bothers
Sources say that only about 60 percent of WinNT apps run on the current Win2000 beta.
By Scott Berinato, PC Week
Incompatibility with existing applications is emerging as the latest problem to plague Microsoft Corp.'s development of Windows 2000.
Only about 60 percent of Windows NT applications can run on the current Windows 2000 beta, sources close to Microsoft said. While that number is up from a figure that hovered around 40 percent when Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) shipped Beta 3 Release Candidate 0 last month, it still falls below the company's target goals, sources said. Since January, Microsoft has shipped numerous interim builds.
"Four out of 10 [running] applications is consistent with what I was getting," said one RC0 tester and custom software developer who requested anonymity and who took his Windows 2000 server down because it was too unstable.
Microsoft has not stated publicly its goals for application compatibility with the Beta 3 release of Windows 2000. But for an operating system that's supposed to ship this year, anything significantly below 100 percent compatibility could pose a major hurdle for an upgrade already fraught with delays.
"If Microsoft wants to reach even its late goals, they need to be close to full compatibility now," said Dwight Davis, an analyst at Summit Strategies Inc., in Kirkland, Wash. "Certainly, reports of these problems leave room to raise eyebrows. Beta 3 is supposed to be stable enough to be operational with some early adopters."
Applications that sources said don't work on the latest beta include Oracle Corp.'s Developer 2000. Officials at Oracle (Nasdaq:ORCL), of Redwood Shores, Calif., would not comment except to say the company expects its products to be compatible with the shipping version of Windows 2000.
Officials at other major ISVs, including Novell Inc. (Nasdaq:NOVL), IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Seagate Software Inc., were reluctant to comment on the matter. Microsoft itself is having a difficult time porting Visual Studio and some BackOffice applications to Windows 2000, sources close to the company said. Another software engineer developing custom applications for Windows has been able to port four of six of his NT 4.0-developed programs to Windows 2000 beta servers. "Beta 3 [RC0] is a long way from being a stable OS," said the engineer, who requested anonymity.
Microsoft officials paint a different picture. Visual Studio 5.0 today will run on Windows 2000 beta systems, although there will indeed be upgrades when the final version of the operating system ships to optimize the development tool for the new platform, said Greg Leake, a product manager at the Redmond, Wash., company.
Craig Beilinson, product manager for Windows client marketing, also downplayed incompatibilities. Asked if application compatibility is where it needs to be on Windows 2000, Beilinson said: "We're working hard on it and continue to make progress every day." He declined to give specific compatibility figures but did list a few applications the company says are running fine: Office 97, Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator browser, Lotus Development Corp.'s SmartSuite and Notes, and the ubiquitous WinZip shareware utility. One beta tester has had mostly positive results running Document Manager for Microsoft Exchange software on the beta.
"If it were a release candidate, I would be concerned [about stability issues]," said Pat Martell, product marketing manager at Eastman Software Inc., of Billerica, Mass. "But it's a beta, and we're not experiencing any serious problems like the level of incompatibility being reported."
Microsoft has acknowledged that the release date for the final version of Windows 2000 Beta 3 has slipped into April. But officials maintain that this won't affect the final end-of-year ship date for the commercial release.
The compatibility issue, however, calls that timetable into question. At some point, the company may have to decide which is more important -- full backward compatibility or getting the product out the door.
Solidifying the 35 million lines of code in Windows 2000 has proved to be imposing.
Additional reporting by John G. Spooner of PC Week and Mary Jo Foley of Sm@rt Reseller |
