The year 2000 did not go down as a good one for Bill Gates and Microsoft. Plagued by a flagging market, the ongoing anti-trust saga, and a less-than-enthusiastic response to Windows 2000, its much heralded successor to Windows NT, Microsoft has never been as precariously positioned.
Perhaps the recent earthquake in the Seattle region is a prescient sign of things to come, as Microsoft is clearly treading a fault line. On one side lies a battered Goliath, still chalking up giant, yet slowing sales for its flagship operating systems. With the recent slowdown in PC sales and ongoing enthusiasm for Internet-ready computing devices like PDAs and mobile phones, the PC OS market, which accounts for close to 70% of Microsoft’s revenue, is looking more vulnerable than ever before. It’s no surprise, then, that the product mill at Microsoft is in overdrive.
On the other side of the chasm, however, Microsoft remains poised to extend its ubiquity through the release of the Window 2000 and Windows XP operating systems, as well as ongoing advancements in the streaming media sector.
The safe bet is that we haven’t seen the last of the tremors in the Microsoft camp – losing 50% of market capitalization will do that to a company. It’s no surprise that the hype machines are doing everything they can to bury the bad press under “strategic” new product launches. Many in the industry expected Windows 2000 to take the desktop by storm.
The smart money, though, was on public indifference. Companies averse to adopting “1.0” versions of any new operating system stayed away from Windows 2000 in droves, insisting that they were satisfied with Windows NT and would wait until Microsoft released a “service pack” or two before considering a move. It didn’t help that peripherals and printers installed under previous Microsoft operating systems (Windows 98 for example) no longer worked with Windows 2000.
Consumers, meanwhile, balked at the steep hardware requirements and “bloatware” of Windows 2000 – and they were not sufficiently dissatisfied with the performance of Windows 98 and later Windows Me to want to make the switch.
But in 2001, you can expect Windows 2000 to encroach substantially upon the territory of its predecessors. There are many reasons that this will happen, not the least of which is that Windows 2000 is now a mature, stable platform which has been upgraded with one service pack (or upgrade) and many enhancements since its release. Many of the driver-related issues have now also been cleared up, making the migration path from older operating systems less prone to hair-pulling aggravation.
Also, most software and hardware vendors have now upgraded their products to work seamlessly with Windows 2000. Last year, early adopters of the robust operating system were frustrated by the snail’s pace that manufacturers took when making their products compatible with the new platform.
Home users are likely to wait some time before moving to Windows 2000 in droves, but the switch to the Windows 2000 platform is inevit-
able, even for them. The reason is
that Microsoft’s next operating system – WindowXP, unveiled in February to a lukewarm reception by IT press – will signal the end of the line for the
DOS-based Windows 98/Me platforms. WindowsXP is based entirely on the technology behind Windows 2000. Will that matter to consumer and business users? Microsoft certainly hopes so.
Many of XP’s calling cards – tiered user access (borrowing the “super-user” and “user” monikers that enable multiple users within a single session), built-in driver support, remote assistance, and an updated media player – will likely be hits with consumers and business professionals. The word on the street is that it is already considered more stable and faster to load than Windows 2000. For Microsoft, the pendulum appears, at long last, to be swinging in the right direction.
