Makes you wonder if Microsoft is in cahoots with Intel and other
chip makers.  Note:

1.  You don't need much speed for word processing. Internet
    browsing, accounting or moderately simple spread sheets.

2.  Programs are being sold claiming (are they lying?) to
    make your PC and Windows Y2K usable,

Nick D.


Wirt Atmar wrote:
>
> 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