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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: t2 who wrote (31208)	10/27/1999 5:48:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

It's not a big deal, but Microsoft did slip badly on the release of W2K. I don't watch CNBC, but all the printed stories I've seen are getting it right. Early this month, Brian Valentine told a group of IT professionals that "...we are still confident that we can make it this year." zdnet.com Microsoft never promised a date and Valentine was coy about it even in that speech, but it's clear they were still hinting that it would ship in 1999. (RTM is a big deal at Microsoft since that's when the raucus parties happen followed by vacations and short work days, but it's rarely a significant date to those outside the company.) The slippage is obvious even from Microsoft's own rules of product naming. When NT 5 was renamed Windows 2000, Microsoft changed the rules. Instead of naming a product with the year in which it is scheduled to ship, Office2K, Windows2K, and all other products were to take the year following scheduled ship date. That was designed to avoid the problems like Office 97 that shipped so late in the year that few copies were available until '98. In that same article linked above, Valentine talked about the PR problems of their ever-slippery dev schedule: "We've been late in shipping Windows 2000. We're now reading articles that question whether Windows 2000 will be viable in the data center environment. We need to turn that situation around and prove them wrong," he said. Another example: Here's a copy of a story from April at #reply-923324. "Microsoft Corp. remains on target to ship the main versions of its Windows 2000 operating system software by the end of this year, a company executive said Thursday." Reporters actually got it right even before the official announcement. On Oct. 15, there were several stories saying that the product would not ship until the new year: #reply-11568327