Don't Call It Win00

Oct 27 1998

Just when we were getting used to the abbreviation Y2K, Microsoft is introducing W2K - that is, Windows 2000.

The company announced Tuesday that its long-expected Windows NT 5.0 operating system will be renamed Windows 2000 and released next year in four flavors: Windows 2000 "Professional" for corporate desktops, "Server" for workgroups, "Advanced Server" for larger departments, and "Data Center Server" for the most powerful version that supports up to 16 processors working in tandem.

NT 5.0 - now Windows 2000 - is Microsoft's big push to displace Unix systems such as Sun Microsystems' Solaris and mainframes in corporations. Once expected to ship this year, it has been plagued by delays and is now likely to appear in final form in the second half of 1999. Those delays have given rivals like Sun needed time to bolster their product lines. Many traditional Unix vendors also see the Windows NT/2000 invasion as inevitable, however, and are also building machines that run Microsoft's operating system.

Despite the announcement of the top level "Data Center" version, Microsoft officials acknowledged Tuesday that Windows will have limited reach into the highest echelons of the network.

"We can now build servers that can support tens of thousands of simultaneous users," said Mike Nash, director of server marketing. "But we recognize that there's a lot of work we need to do to evolve" the system, particularly to do batch processing and other high-load functionality.

To balance those shortcomings at the high end, Microsoft argues that the choice of hardware server systems that run Windows 2000 will keep prices competitive, and that those systems will be able to connect more easily than Unix servers to Windows-based desktop PCs.

Windows 98 will remain the consumer version of Windows, but the next version will be overhauled to match the NT code base, according to Microsoft VP Brad Chase . He declined to say when that overhaul would take place.