Windows 2000 - Nine Months to Live 620
HeUnique writes "According the this story at The Register, Microsoft is planning to retire Windows 2000 as far as OEMs concerned. MS has asked OEMs to stop immediately the shipment dual-boot systems running Win2k/WinXP, so your choice now is either to upgrade to XP or else." Only if you're ordering systems running Microsoft Windows, though.
wk2 still has a lot of life left. (Score:1, Insightful)
FlooD GateS OpeN (Score:0, Insightful)
BTW, one post was sufficient enough for whatever racist idiot posted first, please don't dignify it with anymore replies.
Re:Win2k and Common English (Score:1, Insightful)
they are about the short term solution
they are about the now
they're not a long term solution provider
they're just riding on the crest of the wave
this is not surprising considering they launched
to provide tools platforms for the toy market
Re:wk2 still has a lot of life left. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are 2 statements there: he says they are stopping OEM shipments altogether in 9 months, and pressuring PC companies to stop shipping dual-boot systems right now.
So hot to spit your comment out that you didn't read the article?
2k is still by far the superior 'service running' machine... and it's not going anywhere anytime soon...
Especially since they don't even have any other OS for server-use yet. But
Re:Disturbing (Score:2, Insightful)
And yet you keep developing for the Microsoft platform.
Re:Disturbing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:wk2 still has a lot of life left. (Score:4, Insightful)
This has everything to do with MS's scheduled death of Win2k. They've realized that it is a great operating system and could likely support most businesses for the next decade or even more. What happens when everyone on the planet gets a Win2k license? No more money for Microsoft.
With WinXP, they've got this shifty licensing program that will likely confuse consumers into purchasing multiple copies when they don't need to. Steady revenue for Microsoft.
The gov't needs to intervene here - MS had better not drop support for the OS as long as it is viable, damnit. We bought it so we will use it for as long as we need to. We *had to* upgrade from Win95 when they played that card (they offered to support it but each incident was going to be $150k up front).
Re:Windows fragmentation? (Score:5, Insightful)
From a company's point of view windows and Office are fine the way they are now, just like they don't need a new type of screwdriver they don't need a new OS or office suite. Thats the big problem MS has at the moment, they have sold their software to almost everybody so now they will have to look for ways to make these people pay once more to be able to keep making profit on windows and office.
Not what headline says... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is objectional because XP is too intrusive and the licensing is going over the line versus 2k, and while we may lament the passing of 2k, it also is a MS product, not competition being driven out. Personally, I think wine is approaching being a valid solution for running most windows applications now when necessary, and running windows applications is becoming less and less necessary (except for games) as other viable options appear. For office applications, there is openoffice and koffice, multimedia playback and encoding has at least caught up with Windows, if not passed it (though authoring still has a way to go). For CAD apps ProE is on the way, for 3D rendering there is blender (if the engine goes open source, interfaces may be made that cater to users of other applications). Everything for getting work done is coming in one form or another.
Re:Really? (Score:1, Insightful)
Windows and how you get tied to it (Score:4, Insightful)
1. What about 3rd party applications? I work for an integrator that does IP telephony and traditional phone systems as well as networks.
We have not even been able to transition to Win2K from 98SE for our field techs because many of the 3rd party maintenance packages only run under 98. Add to that new "web interfaces" for IP based products that only run under IE 5.01 with a specific version of the JVM. Not to mention the legacy products we support that require DOS based maintenance access programs!
2. The main issue that many of the people posting here are missing is MONEY. I work on the pre-sales side of my firm and the number one issue with deploying ANY new technology into any client is always money. I have had $100,000 plus deals fall apart because they required a couple of $3000.00 routers to be added to the client's ageing network infrastructure.
So when people start talking about how the costs of upgrading to XP from the software side, and how we should all be on proper "product lifecycles" and such, I have one question, do you realize the state most businesses are in right now? Many of my clients are canceling all IT upgrades and initaves for the remainder of the year.
Comment #2
Now I may be trolled out for this one, but I due to the reasons above the IT guys in my firm can't move to Linux on the desktop even if we wanted to. Why? Legacy 3rd party applications, tools supplied by vendors built on Microsoft technology.
Ok so even if I got all the issues with ease-of-use, support, document compatibility and user training. I still can't move to linux because we have major line-of-business applications that only run on windows. For example, our accounting package (>$100000 invested in the last 3 years, so don't even talk about scraping it), our customer service ACD monitoring package ( a whole market that has next to no presence on Linux) and our remote monitoring and alarming system for client sites. All run on windows back-ends and have only windows clients. Even the newer ACD package which can be setup totally web based requires IE. So we're stuck.
What I (and I am sure many others also) need to move to Linux is an inexspensive and 100% compatible Windows API Layer for Linux, then I could slowly move my clients to Linux.
Now don't get me wrong, I am using Linux as our web proxy, I use sendmail for our marketing newsletter mail-outs. I am going to place an e-smith server in front of our exchange servers for the virus scanning service offered and to help filter SPAM. (Plus I can toss Mcafee and ITS high fees) I am even looking to replace our old Access97 based service database with a Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL based web app. And THAT one is solely to avoid having to upgrade my Access licences.
So I put it back to the community of Slashdotters, how can one cut the ties to windows, when so much of thier business processes are tied to it and with shrinking IT bugets?
Obi-Wan
Re:Windows fragmentation? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You're all looking at this the wrong way. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to agree with Ian on this one, both on the blindingly cynical real reason for the upgrade (more beans for Microsoft), and on the even more compelling user-centric counter view to this.
The only thing I'd like to add in this favour is that any competent organisation ought to be able to fight this push to upgrade with a really simple economic argument: Software solutions tend to get sold on a Return-On-Investment basis - If I buy an MS-Office based environment, my ROI over a period of time is given by:
(increased productivity measured using appropriate methods) - (cost of software AND cost of hardware AND cost of supporting solution)
(naturally, estimating the increase in productivity is where a lot of companies fall down, but you'd be amazed how many can't even estimate the second term in the above equation either)
My point here, though, is dead simple: theres an implicit time term in the above equation such that the costs are amortized over a period of time. Modulo normal accounting depreciation etc, this implies that an organisation gets better ROI if they can keep the same solution for as long as possible. This directly conflicts with MSFT's desire to force regular upgrades (which increases the costs element of the solution whilst only marginally - if at all - increasing the productivity improvement size).
As a good little corporate drone, it astounds me that more organisations haven't caught on to this and had a feedback effect on the IT industry as a whole - large corporate entities, especially financial institutions, should be cautious as all get-out when it comes to adopting new technologies or solutions. And yet we all blindly tread on the Shiny Thing treadmill, haemorraging money in a continual game of replacement and upgrade, fix and debug, for little gain.
Bah. We should have stayed on those green-screen thingies with nice reliable mainframes behind them
This has been an Old Phart Rant Courtesy of the letters M,S,F and T, and the day Monday
Re:windows XP in my company (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet for some reason, a lot of Windows XP advocates seem to think it is. Not that you are one - I'm just speaking from my general experience.
Re:saddenning (Score:3, Insightful)
. . . except for the bit about it fitting quite well into Microsoft's current 'sales' strategies.
Point one -- the BSA scares buisnesses. When Microsoft and cronies have the ability to demand an audit of your computers for 'license compliance' and the ability to levy huge (to the point of unreasonable) fines when the inenvitable noncompliance is found, buisnesses get the mental image of writing large checks -- not a good thing.
Point two -- Microsoft already provides [microsoft.com] some limited facilities for atomatic tracking of licenses. As I understand these facilities, however, their liability is in that everything has to be mannually entered.
Point three -- Microsoft is probably going to tout Palladium on the point of security. I speculate that it will not only be marketed as security from the Evil Hackers (tm, c, patent pennding) [and security from fair use of purchased media] but it will also be marketed as security from piracy. As part of this initiative, which Microsoft (rationally, as the one selling the software) hopes will take hold like wildfire, I speculate that Microsoft will add automatic license tracking -- when an OEM corporate system is first turned on, it will register itself [more specificially its license and machine hash] with a server on the corporation's network. Then, periodicially, the corporate people can do a license audit at the click of a button, asking all machines on the network to verify that the machine-hash for the system has the proper license installed for the system that the machine is currently running.
As if that weren't enough of a boost to phone-home capabilities, which can be surrepeitiously included in the LAN-activation, Microsoft can rent out its services as a license-management entity for those corps that don't want to run their own server for it. Furthermore, it's only a small step from the above pagagraph to one where the license-server becomes authoritative (and thus a valid defense) in the case of a BSA audit -- completely disable manual addition and removal of licenses, and have the entire process automated and encrypted. Of course, these systems will have to phone-home to Microsoft for the key-of-the-day.
When it first started WPA in Windows XP, Microsoft made the mistake of not doing anything for the the corporations that it was trying to sell XP to; Product activation was billed entirely as something for Microsoft, and (so far as I know), offers no protection in the case of a BSA audit, so corporate types were not given a large enough bribe for the breach in their privacy and network integrity. You can bet that Microsoft doesn't like that, and is going to try to find a way to slap the big-ticket corporate purchases with the same kind of restrictions they're getting away with for home users.
Re:Windows fragmentation? (Score:4, Insightful)
My day was not darkened by this senseless expenditure, though. Why? Because the hardware vendor provides Linux drivers for the built-in card. I never thought I'd see the day!!
Start fighting now (Score:2, Insightful)
It is the first time I've actually seen a glimmer of understanding from my non-computer-professional associates.
I'm also busy letting all my application vendors know that Win2K was the last Windows O/S I'm ever going to buy. For example, Avid (who makes high-end video editing software) just released an upgrade for their product. But it only runs on XP or OS X, not on Win2K. I told them they instantly lost the sale because of that policy.
All of you 'realists' who say that Microsoft has already won, and will keep on winning, are wrong in that we have to start really nagging consumers about Microsoft's continued software fascism. The situaion won't change any other way.