PBS's Cringely rants against Mikeysoft
Mikeysoft rep said to upgrade to Windoze 2000 to fix Y2K bugs. But this doesn't make sense in large corporate environments where such upgrades require 6 months of testing and planning... Especially when the product likely won't be stable enough to pass the corporate testing phase. Plus remember the upgrade pains from NT3 to NT4, well this will be NT4 to NT5...
The entire article is worth reading, below are excerpts of the main points.
pbs.org
Windows 2000, Users Zilch
The Y2K Disaster Parading as Microsoft's [the pulpit]
Windows NT Marketing Plan
By Robert X. Cringely
[...]
Sitting for 15 hours on the plane flying back to San
Francisco -- with United Airlines for some reason
repeating the same movies I saw on the way over -- I
had plenty of time to go over in my mind what the
Microsoft rep had said. It was simple: "Our operating
system for business is Windows NT. With relatively few
exceptions we recommend upgrading to Windows NT 4 and,
once it is available, to Windows 2000 (formerly NT
5)."
What could be wrong with advice like that? Plenty. It
is probably enough to get an IT director fired for
following it. The problem is Y2K.
[...]
The current version of NT is 4.0. In order to make
changes and improvements in the current product,
Microsoft gives out for free what it (and IBM before
it) calls Service Packs. These are bug fixes and
feature upgrades. The most stable version of NT
available right now is version 4.0 using Service Pack
3 (SP3). Unfortunately, SP3 is not in itself Y2K
compliant despite Microsoft's past claims to the
contrary. The company has since shipped additional
hotfixes (fixes to the Service Pack) that make SP3
sort of Y2K-ready. But sort of isn't good enough, and
even Microsoft has recognized that by issuing a new
Service Pack specifically for Y2K -- SP4. That's the
good news. The bad news is that SP4 is buggy and there
are now so many hotfixes to it that Microsoft is
preparing SP5.
Now pretend you are in charge of computers for some
big company. This is March. Y2K is looming. In order
to be ready for the end of the year, the smart thing
to do is "freeze" all software by June 30. This means
Microsoft is almost out of runway. If there is not a
100 percent complete and reliable Y2K fix for Windows
NT real soon, things will get ugly.
Is anyone in Redmond on top of this? Not that I can
see. The Microsoft spokesman in Melbourne said the
answer was Windows 2000, but he couldn't say Windows
2000 would ship by June 30, nor would he guarantee it
would ship without bugs.
Here's a dose of reality. Windows 2000 is a HUGE
technology change. For a moderate to large shop it
will take at least six months of planning, design and
testing before they could even consider deployment. A
very important aspect to the migration is to clean up
and simplify the present NT 3/4 operation. If you've
let your shop evolve out of control into a chaotic
mess, you've got to fix it first. Yet what we know so
far is that the last stable version of NT isn't
Y2K-ready, the version that is supposed to be Y2K
ready isn't reliable, and Microsoft's answer is to
shift your entire system to a new OS that probably
won't be reliable, either.
[...]
The bottom line here is that no one in his right mind
would consider upgrading to Windows 2000 on a large
scale this year, especially if it ships after June. If
the code is not clearly 100 percent free of serious
bugs, the risk is just too great, YET MICROSOFT
RECOMMENDS JUST THAT. Even the most bullheaded IS
folks will understand if there are big problems in
January, and they spent the last half of 1999 playing
with new stuff and did not adequately protect their
companies from Y2K, then they will be fired. Only an
idiot would not play it safe for the last three
months. But then there will always be idiots.
[...] |
