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This is how Windows 2000 begins: not with a bang, but a whimper. Surprisingly, my guess is that Microsoft wouldn’t want it any other way.
On February 17 in San Francisco, Microsoft belatedly launched the new OS that Bill Gates describes as “the most ambitious software project ever,” and how ambitious it is: Two billion R&D dollars, four years, 35 million lines of code, and nearly 2,200 builds later, Microsoft has unleashed a radically overhauled operating system that will serve as its license-revenue mainstay for years to come—generating as much as $5 billion over the next three years, in one analyst’s estimation.
Since the launch, a consensus has evolved that mainstream adoption of Windows 2000 Server, Advanced Server, and Datacenter Edition (available later in 2000) will lag by at least a year as compatibility issues are resolved and wait-and-see anxiety about the OS’s “hardness” (compounded by the endless release delays) gradually dissipates. This prediction is a safe one, but the underlying assumption is that Microsoft will somehow suffer for it — as if all along the company expected IT managers to flock to Windows 2000 just as consumers queued up for Windows 95 with tongues wagging and cash in hand.
Rather, my guess is that Microsoft is the party taking the wait-and-see attitude. Redmond is all too happy to avoid the potential embarrassment of early failures in high-end deployments. Rather, it will continue its volume-focused, attack-from-below strategy while reallocating its massive resources to another front: defining the new APIs, or Next Generation Windows Services, designed to make Windows the operating system of the Internet.
Ready and Available
Much has been made about the superiority of Unix over Windows NT Server in meeting scalability and performance criteria, but organizations relying on NT clusters usually do so for application availability. Thus while the Windows 2000 Server Family contains performance and hardware and software scalability improvements — including up to 32-way SMP support and dynamic load balancing — the most notable enhancements involve availability and manageability.
Windows 2000 is clearly more stable than NT; features such as kernel-mode write protection increase Windows 2000 reliability by a factor of 10 over its previous incarnation, according to Giga Information Group. But the most attractive item on the list may be Active Directory, which dramatically improves network management and the granularity of service provisioning, although the support-infrastructure modifications required can be demanding.
Although “cultural” issues will probably limit its acceptance, in combination these features will make Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition competitive at the top of the market in meeting price-performance requirements. However, Microsoft’s primary goal for now is to rout rivals from the application service provider (ASP) field — an essential step in the company’s strategy to evolve Windows-based apps into services. Windows 2000 Advanced Server, which Gates describes as a “complete platform” for running a transaction-ready Web site, should be more than adequate for the job thanks to what amounts to an integrated application server (IIS, MTS, MSMQ, and an XML parser).
It’s rather easy to deduce that Windows 2000 features such as Active Directory — with its ability to help ASPs configure services on an end-user level — are aimed squarely at this bull’s eye. As Thomas Koll, vice president of Microsoft’s network solutions group, has explained, “Windows 2000 is strategic because there are thousands of Windows-based applications in use, and with Windows 2000, a service provider can deliver these applications online.”
Until Then
Microsoft believes that it will climb up the market when customers begin to “get comfortable” with Windows 2000. Furthermore, by the time Windows 2000 deployments reach significant numbers in 2001, support for 64-bit computing and the availability of SQL Server 2000 should beef up Microsoft’s scalability credentials. In the meantime, the company will happily live off the fat of the land.
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