Absolutely on technical reasons.
Active Directory is basically a patched up version of MSFT's current Domain architecture. They have put a lot of patches in Active Directory to resolve or reduce some tactical thorns in the current Domain structure, but, dont be mistaken - Active Directory is only a patched up Domain. Active Directory will not be much more Enterprise Capable than Domains.
I am quite certain that Gates knows this. That is why he is starting to have talks with NOVL and why Active Directory is a non-100% feature of the first edition of NT5. The Corp. World will quickly realize this and MSFt will lose there last shot at taking Directory Services from NOVL's industry dominent NDS. In fact, Active Directory will be so late that it gives NOVL more than enough time to release NDS on NT which will allow native NDS operations on NT servers.
As for NT, I dont even have to take a deep look into NT5. Knowing what I know of system code role-out history and MSFT's own history of new code roll-out, NT5 in the production world will be a very rough ride. Look at the shier magnitude of changes from NT4 - approx. 13 million lines of code for NT4 vs approx. 40 million lines of code for NT5! And that number is likely to continue to grow. Then we all know MSFT's history of rev. X.0 releases of software. The Corp. World knows this history as well and will test the life out of it before NT5 ever touches a production network. Only the most gullable or immature IT shops would jump on upgrading to NT5 within the first year.
The reason I say year is because in the first 6 months most corp. IT shops will too focused on Y2K stability and repair to even think about a low priority issue like upgrading to NT5.
So Eric, you might have seen some pretty screens on NT5, but until it enters the production world, you haven't seen the critical features that the majority of the corp. world is looking for: performance, stability, better administration, security. The real world will flush these things out, count on it!
If MSFT wanted to really impress me, they should do what NOVL has commited to with NW5. Eric Schmidt of NOVL has commited that before NW5 is publically released (later this summer) 50% of NOVL's own world-wide production network will be running on NW5. MSFT can't even claim that with NT much less NT5. If you or anyone else wants a sense of NT5 readiness, get Gates to make a promise like that. I can garrentee you this - HE WONT!!!
Toy |
