Jim writes:

> I see in ComputerWorld that EDS is upgrading all of their desktops
>  to Windows 98 because they say that MS told them that Windows 95
>  will not be Y2K-compliant and that there will be no migration path
>  from Windows 95 to Windows 2000.
>
>  Can one (or more) of the Windows experts here clarify this for me?

From the few announcements I've seen, it's possible to come to the conclusion
that there's no migration path to Windows 2000 from 95, 98 or NT :-).

What I have seen is that Microsoft is on the edge of dictating that all
machines that run Windows 2000 must be 300MHz or greater, 32MB of RAM or
greater. If that's true, good luck in trying to convince the great majority of
people out there to upgrade immediately. These requirements will eliminate 95%
of the installed base.

Secondly, Microsoft has sent up several trial balloons suggesting that they
are not going to sell Windows 2000 -- but rather lease you some sort of run-
time version which you must renew yearly.

Microsoft sits in a very precarious position and I'm sure that they know it.
In order for them to continue to prosper, the financial model that they work
under requires them to convince the vast majority of their installed base to
upgrade their current versions of Microsoft software every 18 months to
whatever's new. If people ever come to be satisfied with what they have -- or
Microsoft ever produced a perfect product -- they would be out of business in
a year. They simply have no continuing source of revenue beyond the new PC
business.

Because of this financial model, the inevitable result is a bloatware product
that's ever more encumbered with unused features. How else can you convince
anyone to pay upgrade charges if you don't keep constantly adding new
features? But there is a limit to this sort of path and Microsoft may well be
approaching it.

Windows 95 was a revolutionary step over Windows 3.x. It made the PC
essentially equivalent to a Mac. But 98 truly wasn't much of an advance. It
was merely evolutionary, if it was anything at all. There were undoubtedly
innumerable bug fixes behind the scenes in 98, but we run both 95 and 98 here
-- and you can't tell the difference between the two OS's if you're just
running your PCs as a PC.

What is Windows 2000 going to bring to the table that's worth throwing away
most of your current PCs? And if it's it true that 2000 will require a
recompile of most of the programs that you run, that's only going to be the
beginning of a users' costs. Each vendor is going to have to tack a little on
as a part of his upgrade charges also.

There's a tendency, if you're near a guru cluster, to think of NT as
Microsoft's well-developed operating system, the OS of the future. But if you
get out into the real world (Kansas, Iowa, etc.), the ratio of installed 95/98
systems to NT's is probably 5000 to 1. NT is not nearly as popular as
Microsoft wants to make it out to be.

And if it's true that PCs are going to be increasingly viewed by the general
public as primarily terminal-like devices (call them browsers or extremely
thin clients or whatever), and I do believe that to be true, there's good
reason to believe that Microsoft may have a significant hump to get over with
trying to "sell" 2000.

The only thing that will make everything I've said here untrue is if Intel,
AMD and the others can keep increasing the speed of their chips (Intel is now
holding out the promise of 1GHz speeds by the end of 2001). Old PCs will be
disposed of simply to get the speeds of the new machines -- and Windows 2000
will slowly inflitrate the installed base by that means alone.

Wirt Atmar