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Each December, Wired News petitions its readers for the year's most egregious examples of vaporware. This time last year, our research team was busily running down broken promises, empty hype, and slipping ship-dates all over the technology kingdom. But things turned out differently this time around. The overwhelming majority of our readers pointed their collective frustration in one direction: Redmond, Washington.
Microsoft Windows NT 5.0, also known as Windows 2000, is, by popular consensus, the year's biggest broken promise. In an age when software cycles are as short as four months, Windows 2000 has been in the works since 1996, when the product was code-named Cairo. It isn't expected to hit shelves until late 1999.
This is the second year Microsoft has won a vaporware prize. In last year's awards, a Microsoft spokesperson said the 5.0 version would ship in the second half of 1998 while analysts and other industry watchers said that 1999 was a more realistic time frame. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that Windows NT 5.0 wouldn't ship until 1999, and then in October the company renamed the product line "Windows 2000."
So to the question -- why all the delays?
"Historically, it's taken about 18 months for each new release," said Jonathan Perera, lead product manager for Windows NT 2000.
"But Windows 2000 is just such a larger project. The biggest change happening with NT is the integration of a much broader enterprise functionality. For the first time we have a directory that can manage [individual] user and group information at the same time."
Perera said other major additions include security features, such as native support for digital certificates and smart cards, as well as a telephonic API for voice-over IP applications.
"These are things that take a lot of time, and are hard to get right," he said. "It's certainly the most feature-rich release we've ever done," he added, noting that more than 2000 people are working on the project.
One reader had another take on the delays.
"I think the real reason they changed the name to Windows 2000 is that they can't deliver the promises they made," wrote Joe Kaplenk, president of Computer Dimensions. "They created this as a vaporware product to prevent customers from going to other products."
The beta 3 release of NT 2000 will go out in the first quarter of 1999, he said, and depending on the amount of feedback, will last from four to seven months. So Perera is optimistic for a fall release of NT, though no official date has been set.
When the product finally does arrive, the core code of NT will be the basis for all of Microsoft's future PC operating systems, from basic home systems to advanced, networked workstations.
However, Perera said that many customers will wait to see how their Y2K plans develop before adding any major new components to their networks. Roughly 60 percent of their clients, he said, will add only certain parts of the new Windows NT to their system before the millennium.
Kurt Winter, a systems engineer for Can Am Consulting, wrote in to say that the delay of NT has been tempered by the release of Novell's Netware 5.0, and Intel's investment in RedHat, which has been promoting the Linux operating system as an alternative to NT.
"[Microsoft] promised to integrate the multimedia and user-friendly functions of PnP [Plug and Play] from the Windows 9x platform and the security and stability of the NT platform; the workstation edition was promised to unify Intel platform O/Ss," Winter said.
"Now [everyone from] the corporate IS department down to the first-time buyer could benefit from 'New Technology.' Instead we got vapor!"
"Even though I feel that MS makes an inferior product ... it created a whole service sector to handle all the problems their systems cause," he added. "That's why I'm getting into UNIX."
Another reader, Keith Camden, a network analyst with the Sporting News, summed up his thoughts with the following.
"Maybe it should be named 2001, a Windows Odyssey."
Related Wired Links:
Does MS Own Windows 2000?
4.Nov.98
Netscape, Intel Put On Red Hat
29.Sep.98
Windows 97, Windows 98, Windows 99?
31.Dec.97
Vaporware 1997: We Hardly Knew Ye
30-31 December 1997
