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.
Windows fragmentation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone else see massive fragmentation of Windows like this, just due to the extreme upgrade lag of production shops? If it is widely spread, what do people think this mean for Windows in the corporate world?
In addition, is this just a product being retired, or is this a move by Microsoft to start boostrapping Palladium?
Server vs. Professional (Score:5, Interesting)
windows XP in my company (Score:4, Interesting)
So either I'm going to buy a couple dozen licenses of win2k soon,
OR
I'm going to use the existing licenses and don't care at all about licensing (call it non-violent resistance, whatever)
OR
I'm going to start spreading linux on desktop OSes.
Plus, I don't want to upgrade to the Software Assurance thing, 'cause it's going to cost much more and it's not worthed (office 2000 is WAY better than office XP, and I don't want to upgrade - same for win2k/winXP) if you don't want to upgrade.
In any way, Microsoft will lose one of its customers. And I think I won't be the only one.
Anyone else taking care of a network of more than a couple dozen PCs does think like me?
Been using 2k since Dec 1999 (Score:1, Interesting)
But since I'm taking a day off I can enjoy Windows 2000
Disturbing (Score:5, Interesting)
Riiiiight (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Windows fragmentation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably bull$hit (Score:2, Interesting)
This isn't like some little free util going from freeware to cripple-ware or some other triviality. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of corporate users with long-winded paperwork to cover their asses against Microsoft. It's much more profound than the usual "This software has no warranties whatsoever" EULA trite.
You're all looking at this the wrong way. (Score:3, Interesting)
Our shop is about 30% into our Active Directory Migration, Windows 2000 server based with XP clients logging in. (Say what you will, XP's security isn't AS BIG a deal if you've got a properly designed -- and segmented -- network)
Migrating off Windows 2000 workstation should be something you're already doing - not keeping a proactive upgrade policy is just ASKING for trouble. (How is this any different from cycling your hardware out every three years for desktops and every two years for laptops? That's been a standard business practice for a very long time.)
In any event, the forced continual upgrade path for Microsoft products and OS's keeps me employed and keeps me learning new stuff. It also makes those residual Windows 9x boxes in our department look even more prime for replacement. Management has dictated that those machines stay in place for political reasons...Our being able to say 'look, _Microsoft_ hasn't supported 9X for X years' helps us move those boxes forward.
saddenning (Score:4, Interesting)
Where I work, we are still on NT4 and (thankfully) Office97 so there is no WPA in the system yet.
The thing is, even if I went to my supervisor (which I already have) about such issues, the highest brass don't want advice even from their more technically oriented underlings. They just don't care or know enough to realise that they are getting hosed.
Only in 5 years they will feel the noose tightening around their neck and by that point, it will be VERY hard to switch to other platforms, even though I expect that Linux will be very advanced by that time in comparison to today.
What can we do? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You're all looking at this the wrong way. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why?
The company I'm contracting for at the moment is a large multinational financial organisation. It uses NT4, with a smattering of W2K.
Why should they dump NT4? It does everything their typical users need. W2K is being used on some desktops and servers due to the deployment of .Net apps, and eventually a full firmwide W2K rollout will take place. But W2K. Not the untried, untested XP.
I use XP Pro my machines at home. It has features that I want - faster boot times (useful on the laptop), user switching and remote desktop built in. So for me it's useful. None of those features are required on a corporate desktop. NT4 will run Excel, Powerpoint and Word (in that order of priority for most people) quite well enough. The rest of the apps are usually either custom or web-based anyway.
Why upgrade? Why force users to learn a new desktop for no extra benefit? Why junk perfectly good hardware to get more powerful stuff just to run XP? What, in short, is the point?
All the above is practical of course. I know the actual point, that MS doesn't want you to do it and so won't support or license it. However, this 'do as I say or else' attitude is just ludicrous. There's a huge installed base of NT4 in the corporate world, a tiny installed base of W2K and absolutely zero base of XP. MS should support its paying customers.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Windows fragmentation? (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft's decision will backfire (Score:2, Interesting)
This could be a golden decision for Linux.
Probably applies to W2K Workstation (Score:3, Interesting)
That said W2K Workstation and XP Pro are similar enough that just as a lot of folk see no advantage to upgrading, there is not a lot of downside to upgrading. If you want to have a homogenous IT shop in which everyone has exactly the same setup then you will be installing from a pre-mastered disk image anyway.
The slashdot blathering against XP from people who admit they have never used it is simple ignorance. The sae people can be found lambasting Microsoft for unreliable software and then proudly proclaiming that they never upgraded from Win95. Well Duuuuhhh!!!!
XP is a big improvement over w2k in a few areas. The big one being that you can run Win98 software on a system with an NT kernel. The nice to have feature is that my Vaio now reboots in 30 seconds instead of taking 4 minutes.
I think that the real reason that so many of the slashdot crowd are so anti-XP is that they are scared of it. It takes several releases for any O/S to become reliable. In the early days of Linux the main attraction was that it was more reliable than several of the commercial O/S. When Solaris 2 first came out it was a byword for flaky, people were running SunOs for reliability.
Spooky prediction (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously. Anyone still buying Microsoft today is doing so because they have to, because they're counting down the years until retirement and don't want to take a risk (nobody ever got sacked for buying Microsoft), or because they really are just too dumb to see that if they don't bail out before Palladium arrives, they'll never get out. I pity those people, but I don't expect any of them to suffer an attack of clue in the near future.
Retiring MCSA/MCSE 2000 before XP/.NET? (Score:4, Interesting)
According to the Microsoft MCSE FAQ [microsoft.com], they are planning to retire the MCSE 2000 concurrently with the retirement of MSCE XP/.NET and not before.
This makes sense because they haven't even gotten some of their own study materials out for MCSA 2000 until recently, let alone MCSA/MCSE XP/.NET exams are still being introduced. God I hope so, I've just started investing into a MCSA cert (which I hope to have this month) that I plan to upgrade to a full MCSE within a month after that.
But you never know when a vendor moves to "push product." And that's the #1 motivation behind for-profit vendor certifications.
chaos theory (Score:4, Interesting)
I know that I can manage something by using active directory to tweak at a registry-level every machine that logs into the domain, BUT
- doing that requires a lot of time to plan, try, test and develop the tweaking
- after the tweaking, basically all the xp machines will
1. look
2. be more ore less
PLUS: office XP is REALLY bad. I mean, we have an application (SAP) that is CERTIFIED to give back some results as an
So why bother, again? I'm more than happy with win2k. I don't have time, resource AND enough interest to TRY to LEARN windows XP, not even for myself. I've had enough of that crap, and I realized that if I had spent that same much time that I've wasted on microsoft product on Linux instead, we all in our company would have linux desktops with openoffice working smoothly. And I wouldn't be writing those angry slashdot posts
Re:You're all looking at this the wrong way. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well now, funnily enough most of what I do for this organsation is done on an XTerm set as either amber-screen (dev) or green-screen (prod), and involves linking backend Unisys databases to Sybase databases with Perl scripts.
Low tech. enough? :-)
All I really need is for someone to emulate ghosting from non-responsive screens, and I can properly recreate that 1970s look. If it doesn't whirr, scroll the screen with thousands of pointless log lines or simply go beep for no real reason, it just isn't worth programming for.
Cheers,
Ian
Predictable... (Score:3, Interesting)
And that is the nub. In the past, people snapped the latest Windows version like they were hotcakes, in hopes that this would finally be the Windows version that would solve all their problems. This is Microsofts problem: not the fact that there is something in XP that people would want, but the fact that Win2K is already doing a fine job.
The only reason people will buy newer versions of Windows would be Microsoft forcing them to. Witness this move, and the recent "upgrade or pay triple for your licenses" extortion.
trusting XP (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, XP has a fairly new approach to the concept of "operating system"; users, even users who wants to, have little chances to understand what's happening. I'm not talking about those "errors" that can be fixed by XP itself - I'm talking about strange behaviors that let the system usable, sure, but MAY give complications later on.
IMHO, XP it's an OS that doesn't leave enough free space to the user to be considered "affordable" for business use.
Let me explain in another way: I have a quite big amount of machines and users under my Power. With such a quantity of machines, troubles are going to arise much more often than if I had only a couple of dUh-SERS. It's statistic: the more users you have, the more stupid problems that you almost never encountered before are going to arise.
Now, with XP the amount of time you have to spend to "hack" around and inside it to learn where the problem was and how to avoid it, well, it's just not affordable, given the amount of machines I have in my Kingdom. Unless I make my company hire other IT guys, either very well trained (and expensive) or I'd have to train them - and still waste part of my precious time, that I could use in better ways, say, reading their mail.
Using microsoft OS at work is not just like at home when you can click the 'ok' button and forget about what the problem was. in a business you NEED to know why the error did arise, and how to avoid it, and probably how not to make it happen again on another machine - unless you want to go and check each and every machine you have in your business and fix that thing before the CEO hits it. It's a matter of experience (ah! pun): if a window box is configured perfectly, it's not going to give you troubles at all. If you leave even some stupid thing back, well, sooner or later you'll have to spend a great bunch of time fixing it - and trying to understand where the problem is.
Dunno if I made myself clear about that, let me know. The topic here is much more a matter of "feelings": windows's behavior is not scientific, sometimes cannot be predicted.
Re:windows XP in my company (Score:5, Interesting)
Bingo.
I run a GIS lab, and quite frankly most of the apps are geared for NT and are just now being moved to Win2k.
Yeah, they say it *should* work (esri?) but don't gurantee it. You see there is something about GIS that requires you be able to run for days and in some cases bend to the OS of choice to gurantee stability. Strangly enuf, moved from Solaris to NT before I got here and now *thinking* about 2000.
See, the point is: Microsoft is killing off its own profit (potential/actual/otherwise) because most of us Sys Admin types are just now warming to the use of 2000. ( I know I am just now getting there )
I offer myself and another admin as an example:
I've got a few dozen boxes to maintain and the other admin (with a pfy) has 2 labs with a few more than me.
Ok, I'm testing, re-creating a SAMBA PDC before I even touch my server and anything beyond 2 trial boxes (NT to 2k migration).
Issues: Need to upgrade SAMBA (a given) or just perform a couple of manual steps (for each account, ugh) to get win2k to connect to my PDC.
Upgrade goes smoothly, everyone is happy...if something bombs out or goes wrong, I have 2 "outs" at the least.
The other admin went from 98 to XP directly...migrated over the weekend, ran into massive compatability issue, network issue, viral infection issues (new or existing is not clear... prolly both from the users POV) main file server crashed to boot (or not to boot, in this case) and guess what? No backup, naturally.
Instead of rolling back to "the way it was", well, he pressed on and is still having problems.
I wonder why.
I'd asked his co-hort/pfy if they'd considerd moving back until things could be tested further.
Nope.
GAH....
I'd never thought I'd repeat/rephrase this from the military (related to drugs/XP), but;
Not on My Machines,
Not on My Network,
Not on MY WATCH!
.
Re:Windows fragmentation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. And there's another point to that.
I'm sure MS would *love* to get to a rental scheme. But, and this is a very big but, where I come from, and I assume it's that way in most contries, rental is a completely different form of contract than buying a license.
From the law of my country it's quite clear that under a rental scheme, MS would be in big trouble, because they had to guarantee the functionality of the item in question. Just like you could cut on your rental fee of your appartment if e.g. the heating is out of order, the same could happen to microsoft.
Also, IIRC, warranty issues would arise when a virus hits or stuff.
Oh, and it's _not_ up to MS to decide when a contract constitutes rental, so they may well get into that situation just because a judge looks at their license and decides it is rental. Take for instance mandatory upgrades (really mandatory, not just upgrades driven by discounts).
Re:wk2 still has a lot of life left. (Score:4, Interesting)
Bullshit... NT4.0 and Office 97 can carry any business today and for the next 5-10 years. You dont need office 2000 or XP to make money, or make more money, or any of the other lies MCSE's and Microsoft shovel's down everyone's throats.
Dont get me wrong, I HATE NT4.0, it is the bane of my existance (Although I still support a fleet of NT3.5 servers...I have to as the pripetary(SP) software/hardware WILL NOT RUN ON 4.0 or higher) and I do love all my 2000 desktops compared to the NT4 destops I used to have here.
Microsoft started Dying back in 1997.. they have yet to release anything that is needed by businesses cince then... and you can run a very sucessful business with all 1997 software/hardware without suffering from any ill effects if your sysadmins and netadmins + IT/IS staff are competent (read as NON MCSE's)
Long live Windows 2000! (Score:3, Interesting)
I keep thinking this should be bigger though: we should all put MS in a tight spot and hail Win2k as their best offering so far...they can't say it sucks (after all it only came out, what, three years ago?), but at the same time their business plans hinge on the fact that people will naturally upgrade OS every two years or so. So we need to start a movement: I'd call it the Great Microsoft OS Freeze...basically, tell people to stick with their OS if it works (Win98 or Win2k) if they won't switch to Linux, *BSD or OS X...I think you'll find a lot of receptive ears...
It's an anti-Enron/Worldcom tactic (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Spooky prediction (Score:3, Interesting)
I was very careful to say "buying Microsoft today"
.Win2K is, I use it myself. I didn't pay for it, but I'll do that when I get the refund for the Win98SE installation that I was forced to buy on my laptop. WinXP Pro is Win2K with a respun GUI, a vile licensing scheme, and an auto-update mechanism that's more of a liability than a benefit in a business context.
As we're just talking probabilities, I'll conjecture that most companies that use them have also ignored the mid term licensing and ownership issues, and the long term costs of being locked in to a proprietary solution, with every increasing costs to leave.
Which one? Mine or yours?
Take a flying leap into a bath of bat shit. I'm sick and tired of explaining to morons why the product isn't the same as the executable. The reason why I said "Microsoft today" is because anyone in a business context who doesn't have an exit strategy planned now is going to be pushed for time to get out before Palladium bites. And when that happens, they'll be paying to rent access to their own hardware and data.
As I said, I pity you, but I won't shed a tear when you have to make the decision to pay to stay with Microsoft or pay more to leave. I suspect you'll just keep smiling and telling your employer to hand over the cash, because to do otherwise would demonstrate what a chump you were.
Re:Spooky prediction (Score:3, Interesting)
I've already provided my clients with a response to this latest news, which amounts to "continue upgrades to Win2K as already planned, avoid XP and .NET until further notice, continue working towards open solutions (e.g. Java application servers), and don't panic or get excited."
I don't have to twist any arms, and nothing really changes. No-one's rushing to upgrade to XP, but similarly, no-one's rushing to move to non-Windows desktops, nor are they likely to in the forseeable future.