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

To: The Duke of URL© who wrote (47913)	7/17/2000 8:28:48 PM
From: mozek	Respond to of 74651

I couldn't speak for Steve Ballmer, but I can give you a possible interpretation from my personal, non-official perspective. At a certain level of managing an organization, things like product names, product identity and associated features and assumptions connected with that identity become as tangible as the development required to build products. Windows 2000 is an evolution of NT. It's also been enhanced with better scalability, interoperability (IIS, SOAP, full XML support, Kerberos), and a lot of useful, new features. The branding decision to move to Windows 2000 was probably an attempt to put Windows NT into the mainstream of Microsoft's recent Windows releases named after the year. I would expect that some enterprise customers might be more conservative in upgrading systems to a new OS positioned as a replacement, rather than the next version of their workhorse. As a result, these customers might wait for an SR or two before changing a system that currently works. Just my postulation of a possible explanation. Mike

To: The Duke of URL© who wrote (47913)	7/18/2000 9:51:06 AM
From: ericneu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Could you explain what Steve means by this, I thought 2000 was nothing more than an upgrade to NT. "Ballmer also expressed some regrets over Microsoft's move to replace Windows NT with Windows 2000, because of NT's enduring popularity with enterprise customers. "If we could do it again we might have left things alone," he acknowledged. Microsoft originally decided to create Windows 2000 to overcome the notion "that there was this very weird thing on the side called Windows NT." " --- Steve Ballmer was never in favor of the name change from Windows NT 5.0 to Windows 2000. - Eric

To: The Duke of URL© who wrote (47913)	7/20/2000 4:16:06 AM
From: SunSpot	Respond to of 74651

Simple: NT sales were smaller than Win95/98 sales. MSFT want Windows 2000 sales to be the main Windows version. His regrets over the replacement of NT with Win2000 is probably due to the fact, that MSFT would probably be able to sell more, if Windows 2000 would be more like an upgrade instead of a replacement. I have many pieces of hardware with NT support but no Windows 2000 support. Many NT Workstation would be upgraded to Windows 2000 today, if it would upgrade smoothly.