Windows 2000: A Cloudy View
By Cintra Scott
SmartMoney Interactive Edition
smartmoney.com
This supports your "outflanked 'em" thesis.
And while Microsoft's new software strives to be user-friendly, supporting corporate networks of computers is complicated stuff and the stakes are high in professional settings. No matter how many balloons and icons pop up, a lot of things could go wrong with 2000. That's why most industry watchers believe that corporate users will be slow to adopt the new operating system. According to just about all the independent surveys bandied about, the majority of Microsoft's business clients plan to sit back and let others be the guinea pigs this year.
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In a Merrill Lynch survey of 50 CIOs released Jan. 31, only four respondents (8%) could see replacing Unix servers with Windows 2000 ones -- even though Windows-based servers cost a third as much. At the same time, 15 of them (30%) planned to try out Linux soon, which analyst Chris Milunovich interprets as a threat to Microsoft. Windows' lack of reliability and scalability are cited by technology professionals as its two main faults.
We called on PurchasePro's (PPRO) chief technology officer, Mike Ford , to compare the systems from his Internet-centric point of view. Since last summer, Ford has turned his business-to-business company from a mostly Windows shop, to a mostly Unix and Linux shop. "I did my due diligence," he says of the decision. He looked at Windows, Unix, Linux and even IBM (IBM) mainframes. And Ford was sent a test (beta) version of 2000, but he didn't think it was as reliable as Unix. "We need a 24-by-seven operating system," he says.
But it's not just a fear of the unknown working against Microsoft here. After all, some of the biggest spenders on computer technology are all for innovation. It's just that that doesn't necessarily work in Microsoft's favor. After all, techies have also been fastest to migrate to the ever-evolving, open-source rival called Linux.
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"We want to make sure there's stability before we start migrating," Ford explains. "Microsoft has a bad reputation for delivery out of the box," he says. That's why he'll wait for the bugs to be fixed over the next eight months. |
