Cringely column: "Windows 2000, Users Zilch"

["Eric M. Bennett" <ericb@pobox.com>]

Robert Cringely's current column, "Windows 2000, Users Zilch" is worth a
look.  Cringely says negative things about MS from time to time, but this
is one of the most critical pieces I've ever seen from him:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit19990311.html


The article begins:
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The event I attended last week in Melbourne, Australia, was a meeting
of Toshiba's big corporate customers in that part of the world. In
addition to me, the speakers included some of the users themselves, as
well as representatives from Intel, Microsoft and the Gartner Group.
The Gartner guy was sharp and I think gave good advice. The Intel guy
was careful and did his best to keep all the customers happy while
pretending that Toshiba didn't also use processors from AMD. The
Microsoft guy was in some marketing zone that makes sense only within
the Redmond city limits. It seemed to me that his advice was
irresponsible.

Sitting for 15 hours on the plane flying back to San Francisco -- with
United Airlines for some reason repeating the same movies I saw on the
way over -- I had plenty of time to go over in my mind what the
Microsoft rep had said. It was simple: "Our operating system for
business is Windows NT. With relatively few exceptions we recommend
upgrading to Windows NT 4 and, once it is available, to Windows 2000
(formerly NT 5)."

What could be wrong with advice like that? Plenty. It is probably
enough to get an IT director fired for following it. The problem is
Y2K.
=====



--
Eric Bennett ( http://www.pobox.com/~ericb/ )
Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, Cornell University
377 Olin Chemistry Lab

How could [the year 2000] be a problem in a country where we have Intel and
Microsoft?
-Al Gore, Vice President of the United States