Last Paragraph of that story:
Perhaps the biggest change, though, will hit Windows 2000, a product the company has said would unite its consumer and corporate businesses. Ballmer has recognized that the oft-delayed operating system, now expected to launch in February 2000, won't work for both segments. Instead, Microsoft will offer separate versions of Windows 2000 for each market.
In early 98, I predicted on this board that Windows NT 5 wouldn't come out before the end of 1999. With further delays and an increase in code size, I moved my prediction to 2000, and then to 2001, unless Microsoft released a version with much less functionality than promised. Considering that just the name change from Windows NT 5 to Windows 2000 added several weeks to their schedule, what will be the effect on their schedule of a major internal reorganization and splitting Windows 2000 into two products?
Now consider the story that supposedly only 60% of Windows NT software runs on the latest Beta release. For a Beta 3, that number should be somewhere above 99%. 60% is Alpha, not Beta. If it's taken them all these years to get to Alpha, it will take them more than a year from here to get to Beta.
Here's the right way to interpret this: The promise of Windows NT 5 as espoused by Microsoft over a year ago is dead. I'm not making any predictions about the release of Windows 2000 because there will be no release of Windows 2000. Some far more limited OS may be released in a year or so called Windows 2000, but it will bear little resemblence to the OS Nirvana promised so long ago. Fact: they can't get the code base to run Windows NT software. Fact: they are talking about future Windows 98 upgrades. That means that they can't get Windows 2000 to run Windows 95/DOS software on older machines. Fact: they are talking about splitting the code up. That means that they don't expect to solve their problems for the home users---they're going to have to focus all their energies on the already late business version and market Win 98 upgrades.
My guess is that they're going to have to throw out major portions of their code. |
