[Fwd: [Membres] NT 5.0 WON'T APPEAR UNTIL THE YEAR 2000]

[Pierre Baudracco <baudracc@easynet.fr>]

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• To: membres@aful.org
• Subject: [Membres] NT 5.0 WON'T APPEAR UNTIL THE YEAR 2000
• From: Bernard Lang <Bernard.Lang@inria.fr>
• Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 18:36:19 +0200 (MET DST)
• Delivered-To: baudracc@easynet.fr

Publie par Computergram:

Wed Jul 15 11:18:15 1998


+            NT 5.0 WON'T APPEAR UNTIL THE YEAR 2000 

Customers impatient to get their hands on Microsoft's long- 
awaited Windows NT 5.0 don't stand a chance of obtaining the 
software until the year 2000, analysts claim. Neil MacDonald, 
research director with Connecticut-based Gartner Group, said 
Microsoft's revision earlier this month of its timetable for NT 
5.0 betas will delay the launch of its server operating system 
until the year 2000, as predicted earlier by Computergram (CI 
No 3,443). Having been released, it will then take users a 
further six to nine months to deploy the software, delaying the 
process until mid 2001. Worse still, he added that large 
corporate roll- outs, with full deployment of additional NT 5.0 
features such as Active Directory, won't be finished until at 
least the end of 2001. MacDonald attributed the delays to 
Microsoft delaying the launch of the second beta version of NT 
5.0. Originally, the software was due to be released in the 
first half of 1998, but Mike Nash, director of marketing for NT 
Server told Computergram earlier this month the date had been 
pushed back until "some time during the late summer." He said 
the reason for the delay was that the beta 2 did not yet 
contain all the necessary functionality of NT 5.0, as was 
intended. To overcome this problem, Nash explained that M
icrosoft intended to release a third beta; one that would 
include all the features and fully- functioning code of NT 5.0. 
"In other words, beta 3.0 is really what beta 2.0 should have 
been," MacDonald said, "And that's not expected until the 
second quarter of next year." He added that it was "quite 
absurd" to have a beta testing program strung out over the 
course of two to three years. The fact that the first version 
came out in the fall of 1997 and the second beta isn't due till 
later this year was unheard of, he said. He blamed the delays 
on the fact that the NT code had become "so large and bloated." 
Beta one contained 27 million lines of code but the final 
product will have around 35 million, double that used in NT 
4.0. He also said that Microsoft was suffering from 
"development growing pains." "NT 5.0 isn't the largest 
operating system in the world, but it's certainly the most 
ambitious thing Microsoft's ever tried to do," he said, 
"They've never had to deal with a problem of this magnitude 
before and I think they just underestimated the complexity." He 
said the company hadn't scaled its development process well 
enough to cope and the developers, while competent and numerous 
enough, were experiencing a big leap from the old DOS days: 
"I'm not saying it's impossible, AS400 is bigger than NT 5.0 so 
it can be done, I just think it will take the developers a long 
time to work on the subsystems, test them and integrate them." 
MacDonald advised users "not to sit around, doing nothing 
waiting for NT." In the interim, he said there were plenty of 
other alternative operating systems, for example Unix, Netware 
and AS400 to consider. He added that customers shouldn't rush 
to upgrade from NT 3.5.1, saying it was a "perfectly viable" 
system. For those stuck on the idea of NT 5.0, he advised 
against testing any versions of the software until beta 3.0 is 
launched next year.

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 Bernard.Lang@inria.fr             ,_  /\o    \o/    Tel  +33 (1) 3963 5644 http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lang/  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^  Fax  +33 (1) 3963 5469
             INRIA / B.P. 105 / 78153 Le Chesnay CEDEX / France
          Je n'exprime que mon opinion - I express only my opinion
                  CAGED BEHIND WINDOWS or FREE WITH LINUX

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