Windows 2000, one year later

But while Gates's year has come and gone without the bigger Unix vendors even being particularly threatened, much less conquered, by Windows 2000, the operating system formerly known as NT has made an honorable if not exciting showing in a market that generally distrusts anything versioned as 1.0. Microsoft says it has sold 1 million licenses of Windows 2000 since the product launched a year ago, 5 months less than it took to sell the same number of Windows NT copies.

And sales seem to be picking up. Microsoft recently reported that Windows 2000 Professional and Server were in large part responsible for the company meeting its second-quarter earnings estimates, declining PC sales notwithstanding.

Roadblocks to migration
That's all well and good for Microsoft, but a lot of companies may only now be giving Windows 2000 serious consideration. Microsoft can certainly point fingers at declining market conditions, but many of the reasons for IT's initial reluctance to jump aboard Windows 2000 had less to do with IT budgets and more to do with the technology itself.

The first and probably most important concern centered on the new OS's much-vaunted reliability. Yes, Windows had been reworked with improved uptime firmly in mind, but this was far more than a set of feature enhancements to NT. It was software that had been written from the ground up -- 40 to 60 million lines of new code -- with very little flying time under its belt. Early reports, although exaggerated, of some 63,000 bugs being found in the code did not help inspire confidence.

Today, Windows 2000 has been deployed successfully, in both test and production environments, for over a year. Microsoft has also released the first service pack, which ends the first round of the bug fight.

Ostensibly trumping all reliability concerns is Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, a version of the operating system installable only by a select number of Microsoft partners on a small number of certified systems to ensure that installation and configuration problems don't threaten server integrity.

A second issue that slowed initial adoption was the scarcity of Windows 2000-optimized applications available out of the gate. Most existing NT applications ran just fine on Windows 2000, but few were able to take advantage of Active Directory or other enhancements. Third-party vendors could perhaps be excused for the delay, but Microsoft was unable to ship new versions of most of its key server products until late last year.

But given that the new applications will still need to be shaken down and figured out, Microsoft has at least provided a relatively complete back office suite of data, Web, commerce, and management tools.

The last major concern was the general complexity of the upgrade, particularly with respect to migrating to Active Directory. The advantage now is improved availability of tools for helping you migrate, and a consultant community that has had time to become familiar with the ins and outs of transitioning to a Windows 2000 environment.

So, is it time? Many would say that Windows won't get much more ready than it is now, and that if you're a Windows shop, you can't afford not to be planning for the move.

XP: Worth waiting for?
The discussions surrounding Windows 2000 focused mainly on its server applications, and rightly so: The majority of improvements over NT dealt with scalability, fault tolerance, and manageability rather than user interface issues. Microsoft has recently announced Windows XP, the product formerly code-named "Whistler" which converges the Windows 2000 codebase with that of the Windows 9x line, including 95, 98, and Me.

Microsoft has made a number of important improvements with this release, including 64-bit processing, better handling of DLLs, and improved multimedia performance, but the enhancements are aimed largely at the desktop. With respect to Windows 2000 Server, this should be viewed as release 1.1. Expect it to be very much a Windows 2000 world on the server, at least for a few more years.

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