Michelle -
No, this has nothing to do with licensing, I'm sure Dell will be there on launch day. There is a series of invitation-only events sponsored by Microsoft around the country. Invitations go broadly to people in MSDN, other interested developers, and the usual press. The goal is to get developers started on products designed for NT5. If they start now, then there will be some useful applications when NT5 rolls out the door.
These events have many hundreds of desktop machines and a bunch of servers, showing the capabilities of NT5. Developers can take a tour or try things pretty much at their leisure, and a host of Microsofties are on hand to help out (and some of them are really pretty good, know NT internals, networking and directory issues well).
I attended one of these in July. I had expected the usual mix of machines, as we see at other MSFT events. A common event mix is lots of different clients (with a predominance of Dell, CPQ and HP), and usually CPQ servers behind the curtain, although I have seen Dell and HP servers also. But this event had 100% CPQ hardware. I asked my helpful microserf what the deal was and he told me 'Compaq is our exclusive Rapid Deployment hardware partner'. I asked what this meant and he said 'they agreed to supply the hardware and also technical support, also they worked with us on the event content.'
So this seems like mostly marketing with a little bit of technical stuff. Still, I think it was a coup for CPQ. |
