Las Vegas - Microsoft may have changed the name of Windows NT 5.0 to Windows 2000 to allay industry skepticism about NT being late, unscalable and not robust enough for the data centers of large corporations, said an analyst.
"NT has started to develop a reputation of not scaling and not being reliable," said Daniel Kusnetzky, program director of operating environments and serverware at International Data Corp., at a panel session this morning. This reputation has gotten out to the business community and Microsoft is most likely hoping to rid the OS of the NT name in hopes of making people forget their fears about using the product, he said.
Some large companies have worried that NT isn't robust enough to run in their data centers or to run their mission-critical applications, Kusnetzky added. The move by Microsoft to release a Windows 2000 version called Datacenter Server is aimed at getting companies to forget their worries about NT in the data center, he said. Windows 2000 Datacenter Server will be one of a few targeted versions of the NT OS and will be the most robust server OS offered by Microsoft supporting up to 16-way SMP and up to 64G bytes of physical memory.
"Microsoft wants to get up in that rarefied atmosphere of the data center," he said. "The company has had little success there."
The other problem plaguing Windows NT 5.0 is the fact that its ship date has been pushed out further and further which makes people angry that the product is late, Kusnetzky said.
"If they change the name to Windows 2000 and it ships in 1999, then it's early isn't it?" he said.
Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash., can be reached at +1-425-882-8080 or at http://www.microsoft.com/.
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