The Delays Microsoft Doesn't Want You to Know About www5.zdnet.com
I wonder about old Jesse Berst sometimes. This column talks about the indeterminate slips on NT5, like it was a big revelation. Maybe it is, to people who don't know anything about Microsoft except that the stock just goes up and up, and they have all this "great software". Chicago was three years late, right? He also comes up with a replacement acronym for FUD, which I'd never heard of.
When Microsoft falls behind the competition, it makes bold announcements of Something Even Better (SEB). Then, as the SEB ship date approaches, Microsoft announces it's "not quite ready." A few months later it makes another deferment. Then another. Through carefully crafted creeping delays, Microsoft keeps customers waiting for years. During which time they are not buying from the competition.
IBM invented this devious device. In IBM's heyday, we called it FUD -- fear, uncertainty and doubt. But if IBM is the inventor of FUD, Microsoft is the maestro. And never has it used progressive postponements with such frequency and finesse as with Windows NT 5.0.
Maybe Jesse's older than me, but my memories of IBM are different. IBM got slapped with a big antitrust thing vs. CDC around 1970, for "paper machines", vapor hardware used to beat up on Seymour Cray's early supercomputer-type offerings. My memories of IBM from the late 70's onward were of an Intel-like reticence, "We do no comment on unannounced products". Not that there weren't rumors and an industry of IBM watchers, like with Intel now, but the explicit PR promises of the world to come, years before anything's shipping- I don't recall anything like that. Of course, IBM and Intel have something else in common, neither company considers itself immune from antitrust. No matter how "innovative" they might be. Unlike some other company.
Even if NT 5.0 were released tomorrow, it would still be 18 months late. But it won't show up tomorrow. It won't show up in 1998, Microsoft's coy statements to the contrary. It may not even show up in 1999. Microsoft knows this. But refuses to come clean because it doesn't want you experimenting with competing products.
That 18 month thing is a bit odd too. That puts us in Oct/Nov. '96, when NT4 was only out for 4 months or so, right? Of course, NT5 may have had a promised ship date already then, and NT in general did pretty well slip-wise for a while.
So when will NT 5.0 really show up? All signs point to 1999 at the earliest. Or even 2000 if things don't go well in the three areas outlined above. And that's the truth. The truth Microsoft didn't want you to know.
NT2K, the OS for the Next Millennium! The Microsoft Millennium, that is. Be afraid, be very afraid! I guess it could still ship in time to tie with Merced, but my money's on Intel on that race. Anyway, I can't say much about the truth, I don't claim to know it, I just make fun of such claims from other guys around here.
Cheers, Dan. |
