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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bearded One who wrote (1452)	12/17/1998 4:38:00 PM
From: Thomas M.	Respond to of 1600

forbes.com Forget the Justice Department. Microsoft's bigger problem could be embarrassing delays in its most important product. Code name: Godot By Josh McHugh IF YOU'RE WATCHING Washington, D.C. for portents of Microsoft's fate, you may be looking in the wrong place. While the world gawks at the spectacle of the Justice Department's antitrust case, Bill Gates & Co. sweat over a challenge back home in the other Washington: finishing the next version of the NT operating system. It was supposed to be ready by now. Microsoft is careful to avoid prematurely specifying a release date. But it's now clear NT 5.0 won't be out before late 1999—if then. Much of the industry is in high anxiety. PC-makers need a new NT release to spark sales of pricey new PCs muscular enough to run it. Caught in the middle are corporate customers who don't like to be kept waiting. If NT 5.0—recently renamed Windows 2000—runs even later, some fret it might throttle industry wide sales growth for a year or more. Big customers may start freezing big purchases by mid-1999 to brace for the year 2000 glitch. If Windows 2000 isn't ready before then, some might hold off until well into the next year to load up on new gear, says NT consultant Randall Kennedy of Competitive Systems Analysis Inc. "Nothing could be more important than Windows 2000—to Microsoft or to the PC industry," says G. Carl Everett Jr., the head of Dell Computer Corp.'s PC division. So important, in fact, that Dell is taking the extraordinary step of shipping new turbocharged PCs running Windows 2000 before the software is fully ready. It will use a test version, the third "beta" release that, itself, still isn't complete. Dell is betting it will be good enough to avoid catastrophic bugs. Microsoft's future rides on the new release, which will replace the well-worn line of smaller operating systems that drove the company to dominance—Windows 3.0, 95 and 98. Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft began work on the original NT—for "New Technology," rather than "Not Timely"—in 1988, hiring legendary programmer David Cutler from Digital Equipment Corp. His charter: Create a product powerful enough to displace Unix, a widely popular networking system pushed by such titans as Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems. From the get-go, Microsoft was late. The first release of NT, in July 1993, ran more than two years behind the original deadline. Even the current NT 4.0 isn't nearly as powerful as Unix. NT can't "scale up" to serve as many users at once. That's why, despite its monopoly on small desktop stuff, Microsoft must still fight it out in bigger systems. NT 4.0 generally serves Web sites and small networks linking PCs, printers and file servers. The next version, under the direction of engineer James Allchin, is supposed to have the reliability and versatility needed to run networks of thousands of users without crashing. Unix has done that for years. The frailty of NT already has prompted some big customers to give up on it. At The Sharper Image, the San Francisco-based retailer, NT was too difficult to manage remotely. So Sharper Image replaced NT servers with Sun hardware and software. The tardiness of Windows 2000 owes to Microsoft's genetic tendency to stuff myriad new features into each new release. The new features are so sweeping that Windows 2000 holds 35 million lines of programming code, compared with about 15 million in NT 4.0 and 12 million in Sun's Solaris 7.0. Such bloat is fine with PC-makers. Bigger, more complex software demands new PCs with faster chips and more memory. But makers are in the unpleasant position of having the hardware ready now when the software isn't, in a business where inventory loses value by the day. Few big clients will be eager to pay extra for souped-up PCs that lack the hotshot software they were designed to run. Microsoft's rivals are zooming in. Novell recently won contracts to supply Lucent Technologies and Northern Telecom with software similar to the delayed NT's. It also won over Cisco Systems, which has been waiting to wrap new NT features into its Internet routers. Cisco last month agreed to enable its new boxes to run Novell software as well as Windows 2000. It means that when Cisco's new line is ready next spring—and Windows 2000 isn't—customers will be able to buy the Cisco hardware and equip it with Novell software. "They just can't wait any longer," Christopher Stone, a Novell senior vice president, says of his new customers at Cisco. Even if Microsoft can shove Windows 2000 out soon, big accounts may wait for it to prove itself. At Merrill Lynch & Co., where trading operations run on Sun systems, Chief Technology Officer John McKinley says Windows 2000 must prove itself to be as stable as Microsoft says it will be before he'll give it a hard look. To succeed, Microsoft must get a solid test version ready by early next year and mint a final release before summer's end. If many more setbacks occur, they could do more to level the playing field for Microsoft's foes than Justice Department trustbusters ever could.