I have this sneaking suspicion that Win2K could be the downfall of MS. A few of the facts as I see them:<P>1) Many businesses and government entities are adopting a "wait and see" approach when it comes to Win2000. They've been had by MS before with it's claims that NT is a robust, scalable server OS and rather than be burned again they will look before they leap when it comes to MS's next server OS offering. This will impact MS's sales of Win2K immensely.<P>2) Active Directory is a brand new technology. Given the fact that MS's software engineering often leaves a bit to be desired and it took other companies a few versions to make their directory solutions stable (remember NetWare 4.0? *shudder*), I expect Active Directory to be a bug ridden pain in the ass for at least a year.<P>3) Terminal server functionality in Win2000?!?! Is MS f*&$ing nuts?! I run NT Term server at my work and although I will give it credit for never going down with a BSOD, the number of times I have to reboot the machine due to strange software errors is unacceptable for any mission critical systems (oops, I guess I can't reset that connection since both Metaframe and TServer administration Dr. Watson or just don't display anything at all).<P>Well, to cut down on the size of this post I'll stop there, but I could go on with at least 10 different reasons I see Win2K as a possible blunder. Granted, I've never actually run the OS, so you have to take my opinions with a grain of salt, but I just can't imagine that with Win2K the software problems that have plauged MS OSes in the past will magically disappear.<P>Any thoughts?
Could Win2000 be the fall of MS?
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1.) People said the same thing about both Windows95 and Windows NT when first released, but in less than a year after the release of both, they had more than 70% of the desktop.<P>2.) So was NT, so was Novell, so was anything else new... on all points.<P>3.) Nope, they are just making it easier for a business to do business.<P><BR>people always say that the current new MS OS is a blunder yet, somehow, someway, it always ends up being the standard desktop.
Dream on, Mister! I can say from first hand knowledge, it will NOT be the downfall of MS. Nooooooooooo.
qbert:<P>You should give it a try before you bash it. W2K RTM is about as solid as NT4SP6, and Terminal Services work great.<P>Windows 2000 is really the best OS Microsoft has ever released. You can kvetch about the marketing or the lateness, but not really about the product itself.
I am with dan on this one, MS doesn't die from making one, MS will die from lack of making a new OS
Yep,even I hate to admit it,but the damn thing runs nice (win2k rtm).<BR>No troubles here yet (all bodily objects crossed).<P>T
In a word, no.<P>Increased stability from NT code base + DirectX and increased hardware support mean more sales on both the business and home fronts.
qbert - Windows 2000 is lovely. This is what Windows fans _dream_ about, in a box. Fast, stable, massive functionality.<P>Please, please get an eval copy if you possibly can, and joiinnn usssss....
Win2K is fucking awesome, actually.<P>Yeah, BeOS might look cute, Linux might run on lesser hardware, *BSD might be a little more secure, MacOS... well, MacOS just sucks, but the point is, none of them offer the all-round incredibleness of Win2K.<P>It has hardware support, it has software support, it has ease of use, it has tweakability, it has cool features, it has stability, it has reliability, it has everything I want.<P>For the time being, at any rate.<P>Can't MS just hurry up and release NT 6?<P> View image: http://forum.arstechnica.com/forum/ubb/biggrin_old.gif
Damnit, I have to agree. It stomps booty. It's the interface I know and love perfected and infused with rock stabilty.
Do you guys know the development cycle that Windows 2000 has been on?<P>They would code for around 3 hours a day, build for several hours, then perform automated QA testing the rest of the day. They did this every day.<P>Now, this is an amazing way to develop something. I've never heard of such a thing. Building and testing every single day. Wow.<P>I hope it pays off. I like what I see so far. I really do.<P>>LM<
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR><I>Originally posted by Lord Midnight:</I><BR>Do you guys know the development cycle that Windows 2000 has been on?<BR>>LM<<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>Yeah, I saw the video. 2000 was on a 24-hour cycle of coding/testing. They had boxes just sitting there copying a 1TByte file back and forth, another box making RAS dialups/disconnects all day. They had a whole team of people just building testing rigs. The poor OS was hammered every day for three years. Does anyone know of any other OS that got this kind of stressing before release?
I should've been more specific when I made this thread. My comments were more oriented toward server installations rather than workstation ones. I suppose that you are all correct when you say that MS will continue to dominate the workstation market, yet I still think that as far as the server end goes you're going to see very cautious, slow deployments. I just don't see what Win2K has to offer that other OSes don't. In fact, I just can't see Active Directory taking off when a much more mature, stable, and scaleable solution is available in NDS. How many of you out there have actually deployed Win2K in a corporate environment? And how many of those deployments have mission critical systems running on them? *That* will be the real test of Win2k.
Well, at my place of employment, we are 100% Win32 with a few legacy macs and Win3.1 boxes. All our servers are NT4+SP6. We're are gonna roll out Win2k in a month or 2. The only reason we haven't is because top-level administration wants to take time to plan the whole Active Directory forest and domain structure. One immediate benefit of running Win2k on my office's local server is the built in defragger. Our harddrives are fragmented as hell.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR><BR>The poor OS was hammered every day for three years. Does anyone know of any other OS that got this kind of stressing before release?<BR><HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>Yes, actually. OS/390, OS/400 and several commercial UNIX systems. The open source UNIXs (it almost goes without saying) get far more real-world testing than NT2000 will ever get (in terms of executed instructions) before *every* 'stable' release. Plus they've had many years of real production damage to contend with.<P>My experience of NT2000 is that is very robust compared to NT4 before SP3, but it's a huge memory hog (64MB to crawl on to the desktop, 128 to be usable), It's stable (by Microsoft standards), it supports a shedload of hardware out of the box (including some pretty freaky stuff), It's trivial (but slow) to install, and the default install is a security nightmare.<P>NT 2000 is also *very* expensive. I don't really care about OS costs on a server, but spending $300+ on a workstation OS is ridiculous. Oh, and then I have to spend about the same again on applications. *BSD or Linux are free. They run office productivity apps that are incredibly cheap, if not free and that are completely capable of doing everything a normal user wants.<P>If you want a robust server OS, please look at NT2000, but also look at Unix and (at least) OS/400. <P>If you are looking at a workstation OS, please consider: you will spend $1000 on the hardware. Do you really want to spend another $700+ on software when you can get it for nothing?<P>NT is harder to administer than UNIX. Honest. I have done both.<BR>UNIX admins are usually better, and always cheaper, than NT admins<BR>As far as I know, NT2000 ships with no meaningful software development tools whatsoever (It's not a computer unless it has compilers for C, C++, Java and and interpreters for perl and python - I would expect lisp, scheme, smalltalk and prolog as well)<P>I also like NetWare.<P>And (before I get flamed off the face of the Earth):<BR>i don't like macs very much either.<P>
I must say your use of the term "NT2000" lends considerable credibility to your opinion.
excession:<P>Is your last name Kirch?<BR>For the cheap bastards in the audience (of which I am one)<BR>Perl is free (http://www.activestate.com)<BR>GCC is free (http://agnes.dida.physik.uni-essen.de/~janjaap/mingw32/)<BR>Java is free (Sun or http://www.microsoft.com/java/) <BR>The only text editor you'll ever need (vi) is free (http://www.gvim.org)<BR>Python is free (http://www.python.org/download/download_windows.html)<P>_So what_ if I have to download them. Are you telling me you've never had to download some software for Linux?<P>P.S. Some people might consider it ironic that an avowed GUI fan such as myself considers vi a state of the art editor View image: /infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif
Just for sake of argument, Windows 2000 is at the same price point of Windows NT 4.0.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR><I>Originally posted by Excession:</I><BR>server, but spending $300+ on a workstation OS is ridiculous. Oh, and then I have to spend about the same again on applications. *BSD or Linux are free. They run office productivity apps that are incredibly cheap, if not free and that are completely capable of doing everything a normal user wants.<P>If you want a robust server OS, please look at NT2000, but also look at Unix and (at least) OS/400. <BR><HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>You call Windows 2000 expensive, and then advocate OS/400? Riiiiigghhttt...<P>OS/400 is Patch City - I've seen the APAR list, it's fucking HUGE. And it runs on ONE platform. Isn't it about $18,000 a year?<P>And NetWare is about to die.<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>OS/400 is Patch City - I've seen the APAR list, it's fucking HUGE. And it runs on ONE platform. Isn't it about $18,000 a year?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>My point was that Win2K + an Office suite is a ridiculous price for a *workstation* OS. For a server (even OS/400), the OS cost is small compared with the installation/hardware/support costs. With a workstation it shouldn't be.<P>Incidentally, You can actually buy (like you get to keep it) a small AS/400 (150 box) with OS/400 and dev tools for around GBP7500 (probably about the same in US$ - I hate that). A decent 170 with all the toys and a support contract can be had for less than GBP 20,000, which is not a huge amount for a fast, scaleable I/O-tuned machine that is so stable it's dull. If you're a bona fide developer, you can do a deal with IBM and get one for next to nothing, in installments. My experience is with bigger ones though. I once had the pleasure of being the only human connected to a realy fat 750 (12 processors, 20GB RAM, 1 TB store). It was unbeleivably quick. Full table scans on 12 GB tables in less than a tenth of a second. Multi-table joins you could miss if you blinked.<P>I agree about the patches though. A friend of mine supports about 300 AS/400s (Yes, one guy can do that in a few hours a week - like I say, it's stable). He was not a happy bunny when IBM released another 2 CDs of PTFs for Y2K stuff 2 weeks before Christmas.<P>And, against all the odds, NetWare isn't dead yet. NDS whips Active Directory's backside, and has an increasing amount of mindshare in enterprise (>10,000 user) companies.<P>To add to some other posts here, I know free (as in open source) software is available for NT. I use CygWin (bash) as my default shell, gcc is my favourite compiler and I can't see how anyone can work without perl. But notice that these are all UNIX tools? UNIX will continue to succeed because the programmers have grown up and learnt to share. If I have a cool utility, I'd rather share it and get some respect than hide it and hope to make a few quid. (disclaimer - I get paid to develop commercial applications - but they only have value to companies - most individuals don't run big SDH/SONET networks)<P>To finish this rant, Microsoft will make a *lot* of money from Win2K, but what then? The market for a PC operating system is going to change radically over the next couple of years. More of the current bunch of home 9x users will move to using web appliances/STBs. The server market has always been sophisticated, and I don't see anything (even Win2K) kicking Unix/OS400/OS390 out of the machine room anytime soon. And more and more geeks move to *nix all the time. What are Microsoft going to be selling in five years?
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR><I>Originally posted by Excession:</I><BR>To finish this rant, Microsoft will make a *lot* of money from Win2K, but what then? The market for a PC operating system is going to change radically over the next couple of years. More of the current bunch of home 9x users will move to using web appliances/STBs. The server market has always been sophisticated, and I don't see anything (even Win2K) kicking Unix/OS400/OS390 out of the machine room anytime soon. And more and more geeks move to *nix all the time. What are Microsoft going to be selling in five years?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>I wouldn't worry too much about Microsoft - they have proven fairly adept at changing course midstream... I still find it amazing how quickly (for such a large company) they moved their focus from networking to internet around 95/96.<P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>. The open source UNIXs (it almost goes without saying) get far more real-world testing than NT2000 will ever get (in terms of executed instructions) before *every* 'stable' release.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>how familiar are you with software quality systems? this is the first time that i've heard it said that 'executed insturctions' is a useful metric. there's a heck of a lot more to testing software than handing it to a boat load of end users.<P> <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>NT is harder to administer than UNIX. Honest. I have done both.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>so have i and i've also trained a few admins in my time. i find NT much easier to administer.<P> <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>UNIX admins are usually better, and always cheaper, than NT admins<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>this is a troll right? the going rate for UNIX admins is almost double the rate for NT admins out here in Silly Valley.<P>[This message has been edited by gpriatko (edited January 19, 2000).]
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR><I>Originally posted by Excession:</I><BR> My point was that Win2K + an Office suite is a ridiculous price for a *workstation* OS. For a server (even OS/400), the OS cost is small compared with the installation/hardware/support costs. With a workstation it shouldn't be.<BR><HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>Except, of course, in about a years time Windows 2000 will be preloaded on all decent tin being sold, so this whole thing is moot anyway. The only time people actually pay the 'going rate' for Windows 2000 is when they toddle into Dixons or something.<P> <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR><BR>And, against all the odds, NetWare isn't dead yet. NDS whips Active Directory's backside, and has an increasing amount of mindshare in enterprise (>10,000 user) companies.<BR><HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>I don't think so. NDS is V. poor. Time-based replication? No disconnected site support? Deletable admin accounts? OU's as security principles? Blurgh.
I must say that I am less than convinced that Windows 2000 was as brutally tested as Microsoft claims. It may be better than their other operating systems, but I seriously don't think one bit that it is worthy of some of the praise it is receiving ("all-round incredibleness"? Give me a break). When it worked for me, explorer still crashed as much as it did in NT, weird login/logout/shutdown errors would pop up, memory leaks galore (especially from Office) would force me to reboot far more often than I'd like, and now it won't even install at all. Microsoft has a way to go before they make an OS that actually bears the appearance of having great quality.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR><I>Originally posted by Rescind:</I><BR>When it worked for me, explorer still crashed as much as it did in NT, weird login/logout/shutdown errors would pop up, memory leaks galore (especially from Office) would force me to reboot far more often than I'd like, and now it won't even install at all. Microsoft has a way to go before they make an OS that actually bears the appearance of having great quality.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>You're a Macintosh user, right? Perhaps Windows 2000 detected that (from lack of use of your right mouse-button, perhaps) and decided to make you feel at home?<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR><I>Originally posted by Rescind:</I><BR>I must say that I am less than convinced that Windows 2000 was as brutally tested as Microsoft claims...<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>Oh how mistaken you are.<P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR><I>Originally posted by Paul Hill:</I><BR> You're a Macintosh user, right? Perhaps Windows 2000 detected that (from lack of use of your right mouse-button, perhaps) and decided to make you feel at home?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>DING! We got a weiner!<P>FYI, Rescind's a known <B>linux</B>-user and an active participant in GNome development.<P>AFAIK, there are no Mac-ophiles here that's running and testing out Win2K. <P><BR>--treatment--<BR>
"pop up, memory leaks galore (especially from Office)"<P>This is an incredibly stupid statement. When you exit an application in NT kernal based OSes (I know this from NT 4, I highly DOUBT it has been changed in W2K), it cleans up all the allocated memory. You can't have memory leaks in user mode apps, at least not after exiting them. So what the hell are you talking about?
So, it's in his interest that Win 2000 fail. Correct? I have not had to reboot Win 2000 once since installing 2 weeks ago. And that includes installing experimental drivers and generally pushing hard to make it crash. Hasn't happened. I run Office 2000 as welland have NO idea what you're talking about. How about some stats on your equipment. And why are you running it at all if you're a Linux user? X crash on you again? I think Paul may be onto something here, it senses your negative vibe....Bad OS kharma.
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