I suppose you can take that more than one way. However, even MSFT can't stop the eventual progression from 32 to 64. As far as I know, MSFT is still porting to Merced. For MSFT to just throw up their hands and say this 64 bit stuff is too hard would be very foolish, IMHO, and I have to believe that if their 'scaling back", it's on platforms, not from 64 to indefinite 32.
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There's no "scaling back" going on at Microsoft - the development of 64-bit NT (er, Win2000) continues. Actually, 64-bit NT has already been demo'd, both on the Merced simulator and on Alpha. The recent announcement is purely a Compaq decision, not a joint Compaq/Microsoft one.
(Following IMHO only - not the view of my employer, blah blah)
Xeons and Profusion scale pretty nicely, are better understood by most IT staff, and cost less than Alphas. Alpha, never a large player to begin with, was being ignored by the consumers in the NT Server marketplace. I think this is just a case of Compaq facing reality, nothing more.
- Eric |
