Dwight Davis Windows Quotations

If Windows 2000 reduces the monthly and yearly cost of ownership, the up-front sticker price won't be the key decision for corporations. But most consumers will continue to use Windows 98, and vendors will continue shipping PCs with Windows 98.

Linux has been somewhat suspect in performance compared to NT 4.0, and if Windows 2000 raises the bar, it raises the bar above where Linux is competing. On the other hand, there's no stopping Linux being the key alternative to Windows 2000 for as far as we can see.

It comes out at sort of this strange time in the company's product evolution, the last gasp of the DOS line and Windows 98.

Telcos and network service providers, ASPs and ISPs, have all been growing as important players in the distribution of software functionality. With Windows 2000, Microsoft clearly thinks it has a much better horse to ride into battle to get these folks as customers. They will emphasize the new ASP channel as one they are especially targeting in that regard. They need a platform that actually runs 24 hours a day, and on bigger hardware configurations.

Even if an application isn't tuned and tweaked to take advantage of Windows 2000, it should in theory run faster on Windows 2000 and be more reliable on a more reliable platform. For a lot of companies, that'll be enough to swap out NT and go to Windows 2000.

They are on the cusp of bigger demand for Windows 2000, and actually now applications are rolling out that exploit Active Directory. They've gone through the Windows 2000 certification process -- I think 150 applications have gone through that, and 70 to 80 are server apps. The picture certainly is a lot more promising than it was a year ago.