Bill - speaking from personal experience, it is far and away the best OS MSFT has produced. I have it on my laptop, and I have not had to power down or reboot in months - because the "hibernate" feature, and the standby features, work so well.
I have not had much experience with the desktop version but those who have also say it is way better than either NT or (could there be any question) Windows 95 or 98.
Corporate customers have a long cycle to deploy a new OS - NT4 took nearly 2 years to replace NT 3.51 as the majority of NT desktop shipments. Those customers have to think about their support staff (training, familiarization), testing of all their in-house and other applications, security and administration issues. With Win2K, compatibility with older hardware is also an issue. So I expect that even though the benefits are clear, many large accounts will still continue to deploy NT4 through whatever deployment cycle they had planned.
One scenario I discussed with one of my clients a year ago may be playing out in some of these accounts. Because they knew that they would need compatible hardware, they started buying "pre-certified" hardware (hardware already certified by MSFT for Win2K) last fall, but using NT4. With their normal replacement cycle, they will have refreshed all of their desktops by spring of 2001. At that time, they will upgrade all of those to Win2K - a zero cost step for them since they are both a select and a platinum customer.
But others have decided that the benefits are worth a more rapid deployment and were just waiting for "service pack 1" which is now out. Those customers will accelerate the replacement of older desktops and shift to Win2K on the newer machines.
But finally, in my long winded answer to your question, I believe it will be pervasive in large corporations 18 months from now. But the uptake of the OS itself may be more evident in 2001 than 2000. |
