>> Bill Fleckenstein told it like it is.<<
Kis, did you know that Fleck is a Seattle boy too.
He's also know as a contrainion (sp), like you too.
Now lets talk about Msft. I owe a lot to it.
Trust me on that.
>> by Jay Greene
Seattle Times technology reporter
Microsoft's problems with Windows 2000 sent company President Steve Ballmer to Brian Valentine's office on his knees, begging for help, last December.
Windows 2000, a product Chairman Bill Gates once called the most important in Microsoft's history, had been plagued with delays. Though Microsoft disputes it, sources said the operating system had bloated at one point to an eye-popping 50 million lines of code.
As it became more complex, problems began to multiply. Morale among the 3,000 or so Windows 2000 workers sank as they wondered whether months of 20-hour days would ever translate into progress.
Ballmer, known for his in-your-face displays of emotion, begged Valentine to take charge of Windows 2000 to end the drift.
Valentine accepted and immediately called a meeting of the Windows 2000 staff. It was a rally-the-troops event that rivaled some of Ballmer's most spirited speeches. "WE-WILL-SHIP-ON-TIME," Valentine demanded.
Today, Windows 2000 is a different product. The development team is stripping away code, dropping features and, perhaps most important, meeting deadlines.
Valentine has laid out an ambitious schedule, planning to ship the final test version, dubbed Beta 3, Wednesday. Internally, the company has set an Oct. 6 release date for the final product, though it has yet to make that official for fear it still could change.
Tomorrow is something of a coming out for both Valentine and Windows 2000. The product is being featured at Spring Comdex, the computer industry mega-show, in Chicago. Gates undoubtedly will talk about Windows 2000 in his keynote address tomorrow morning, and corporate system managers will have their first opportunity to test-drive it afterward.
The Windows 2000 on display in Chicago, though, is far different from the one Microsoft envisioned when it began developing the product four years ago. At the time, Microsoft intended Windows 2000 to be the operating system that unified its Windows line. Personal computers run largely on Windows 95 or 98, while corporate systems use Windows NT, versions 3 or 4. Microsoft planned for Windows 2000, originally called NT5, to have all the functionality that individuals and large corporations could want.
But a funny thing happened. The Internet became a more dominant platform for computing than Microsoft expected when NT5 was on the drawing board. Increasingly, computer users are tapping Internet applications to handle such tasks as e-mail and scheduling.
Additionally, the idea of creating a foundation for every imaginable software application was a far more daunting task than first imagined. The computer code needed to run games is generally not needed by corporations, and the code used to cluster large computer servers to run huge corporate networks isn't necessary for home computer users.
Earlier this month, Ballmer confirmed that Microsoft would update Windows 98, using its current code base rather than the one from Windows 2000.
"We will get there eventually with Windows 2000 in the consumer market," Ballmer said in a speech to computer-hardware makers in Los Angeles. "It had been our target to be here in 2000, but we've decided to do the things that we all need to do to simplify the experience."
The stewardship from Valentine, recently promoted to vice president of Windows development, seems to have invigorated the Windows 2000 team. The pep talk he gave before Christmas was punctuated with cheers from the workers. There is some trepidation that when Windows 2000 goes out the door it may not have all the kinks worked out, but there's also relief that the company has shifted into its ship-the-product mode.
A burly man, Valentine is prone to hyperbole and drama, sharing many of Ballmer's motivational skills. His just-ship-it reputation - built in part from his getting Microsoft's Exchange out the door after it wallowed - made him perfect for the job.
He grew up in rural Centralia and counts bow hunting among his off-work activities. Once, he bet his team that if it met a benchmark, he would swim in the lake at Microsoft, dressed in a woman's bathing suit.
Product release emphasized
Since his arrival, Windows 2000 has shifted course. Shipping the product has become the focus, and development has moved to the background. Specific dates, such as Wednesday's Beta 3 release and the internally discussed Oct. 6 release date, have created an urgency that Windows 2000 hasn't had before.
"It's not a project that's too hard to get done, like some people would like to say," Valentine said at the Los Angeles computer-hardware conference. "We're on a glide path now to get it done this year, and we are going to get it done this year."
To be sure, Windows 2000 still faces bumps on the glide path. To get Windows 2000 out the door, Valentine decided to lop off features that software programmers were still developing. Microsoft has promised two customer-demanded features in Windows 2000 - IntelliMirror, which lets users access their personal data from different computers on the same network, and Active Directory, a "white pages" that lets users find other people not only by name but by preferences, hobbies, job titles and a slew of other identifiers.
But both will be scaled back from the company's original ambitions. Sources say that IntelliMirror will initially store only a portion of a user's personal-computer information on the server that runs as a hub of the network. And Active Directory won't likely have a complete set of graphical tools that system administrators might want to manage their network. The program also likely won't include all of the programming that allows some types of hardware to talk to the operating system.
On top of that, Windows 2000 is simply a beast. Even if it is only 30 million lines of code as Microsoft claims, it still would be the largest commercial software program ever written.
"Valentine's got a problem that he's coming up against math," said Matthew Nordan, an analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass..
WILL SOMEONE HERE PLEASE TELL ME HOW THIS FORRESTER RESEARCH KNOWS SO MUCH??
There is a computer-science theory that one bug will crop up for every 1,000 lines of code. At 30 million lines of code, Windows 2000 would have 30,000 bugs. There is simply no way to correct all of those glitches before Microsoft plans to ship the final version.
Those problems - along with the costs and energy that companies will spend at the end of the year preparing for the Year 2000 computer problem - have led analysts to suggest to clients that they delay installation of Windows 2000. Microsoft likely will release a series of service packs - which correct bugs and add features - in the months that follow the Windows 2000 release. Companies should wait until then, which could be well into 2000 or even as late as 2001, before installing the product, Nordan said.
In a memo to customers in February, Meta Group analyst Steve Kleynhans called the Windows 2000 name "wishful thinking."
"Microsoft's renaming of NT5 as Windows 2000 creates the impression of readiness for corporate implementations during 2000," Kleynhans wrote. "A realistic assessment of the timeline shows it will be 2001 before corporations should begin mass adoption."
Perhaps most problematic for Microsoft is that its delays have opened the market for others. The biggest benefactor may be Novell, the Provo, Utah, software maker Microsoft seemed to have vanquished only a few short years ago.
Novell's days seemed numbered when the company tried to take Microsoft on directly, offering competing operating-system software. The strategy failed and nearly put Novell out of business.
After a change in management, Novell stuck to its original knitting. It developed software that Microsoft wasn't producing: directories, those white pages that help locate other computer users on a network. In the absence of Windows 2000, Novell's directory business has flourished and the company has been revived.
'W2K problem'
Novell is not alone. Sun Microsystems, among the fiercest of Microsoft's rivals, is seeing improved sales of its Solaris operating system, which runs big corporate servers. Sun Chief Executive Scott McNealy, a frequent Microsoft critic, likes to refer to the Windows 2000 delays as Microsoft's "W2K problem."
Windows 2000 delays are also helping fuel Linux, the operating system developed eight years ago by a Finnish university student. While Linux has a loyal following among the hardcore techie crowd, few see it as more than a niche competitor to Microsoft. But that niche is growing, in part because of the Windows 2000 delays.
"Customers are saying, 'Why should I wait when there are other alternatives today?' " said Ransom Love, chief executive of Caldera Systems, which sells Linux to businesses.
An illustration of how far Linux has come: Tomorrow, Linux creator Linus Torvalds is scheduled to speak at Comdex a half-hour after Gates ends his keynote address.
With all the problems Windows 2000 faces, why is Microsoft so intent on shipping it by year's end? It's probably a combination of three factors, Forrester's Nordan said.
First, there is some pressure on the financial front. Microsoft is issuing coupons to customers who buy servers with Beta 3 pre-installed.
For accounting reasons, the revenue generated from those sales will be accounted for in Microsoft's second quarter - from Oct. 1 through Dec. 31. If Windows 2000 is delayed again, Microsoft would have to defer that revenue to the quarter when the product ultimately ships.
While that's not a significant financial burden, it creates some uncertainty in the financial markets. In Microsoft's third quarter that ended March 31, it wound up deferring $400 million in revenue from Office 2000, because coupons sold with Office 97 upgrades would not be fulfilled until the product ships this June. Investors took the news in stride, but it did force analysts to readjust their economic models for estimating Microsoft's financial prospects.
Another reason not to delay the product any longer is that customers have put off upgrading Microsoft's current offering, NT4, while they waited for Windows 2000. That wait has become so prolonged that customers are beginning to get restless.
"That situation can't go on forever," Nordan said.
Finally, Microsoft's pride won't allow the company to put Windows 2000 off any longer. The delays have been something of an embarrassment. It was to be the centerpiece of Microsoft's operating-system business and, indeed, the core product of the company.
"It's the Colossus of Rhodes that is struggling to be built," Nordan said. "It's a big ego thing." << |
