Enterprise Captain Ushers In Windows 2000

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February 17, 2000 (12:35 PM EST)

Standing before a billboard-size mock laptop that rose to the rafters inside the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on Thursday, the captain of the Starship Enterprise ushered in Microsoft's enterprise-class operating system.

"The future of business begins now, and it is tremendously exciting," said Patrick Stewart, star of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," opening the launch festivities for Windows 2000.

"Some of you might be asking: What does this actor know about the future?" Stewart said, pausing and beaming. "I've been there."

The actor, producer, and businessman noted the speed at which technology is changing and that corporations have to keep pace. He said he is "anxious to be at the forefront of technology."

With the wait for Windows 2000 finally over, business customers can deploy it on systems of all sizes to slay their dot-com competitors. Critics can say they told you so if it fails to meet expectations. Either way, Windows 2000 Professional, Server, and Advanced Server are finally, officially, and firmly in customers' hands as of Thursday.

Stewart turned over the helm to Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates, who called the launch a "huge milestone for computing."

"The Internet is now moving into a more sophisticated stage with more sophisticated services across the Web," Gates said.

He called Windows 2000 a huge milestone for computing that will be the foundation for all of Microsoft's forthcoming server products this year, including Windows 2000 Datacenter, SQL Sever 2000, Exchange 2000, Application Center 2000, Commerce Server 2000, BizTalk Server 2000, and Host Integration Server 2000.

"Before today, people had a perception of more scale on low-volume systems," Gates said. "The high-volume PC server systems had very rich tools. With Windows 2000, this situation has changed. In terms of reliability and scale, this goes beyond what you could ever do with a single box."

The level of transaction support is better than ever before, he said, pointing out that Windows 2000 has broken a world record benchmark test established by the Transaction Processing Performance Council.

As he has for months, Gates emphasized the products' scalability, manageability, and reliability. He pointed to new customers who have already deployed Windows 2000 in production environments. Compared to consumer launches of Windows 95 and 98, Windows 2000 was seriously targeted for business and it focused on partners.

On a lighter note, a handful of Microsoft workers in polar bear suits patrolled the front of the theater before the keynote address. They were looking for penguins, the official mascot of Linux, and "polar bears eat penguins," a Microsoft spokesman said -- displaying his lack of geographic knowledge (polar bears live in the Arctic, penguins in the Antarctic).

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant is positioning Windows 2000 Professional as the operating system for desktops and notebooks of all sizes. Server is meant for running file, print, intranet, and communications infrastructures. Advanced Server targets high availability and scalability of e-commerce and line-of-business applications. A Datacenter Server for larger, critical applications such as online transaction processing and data warehouses is scheduled for release later this year.

In all cases, Microsoft said Windows 2000 will help businesses function in Internet time. The platform has integrated Web communications, security, and application services and can help bring e-business solutions to market faster, Microsoft executives said. It has support for COM+ and XML, as well as the integration of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Internet Information Services 5.0, giving developers new tools to build Web solutions for hosting and managing websites and intranets.

Windows 2000 supports a number of new devices as well, including more than 11,000 hardware devices, Microsoft executives said. With support for plug and play, it works with notebook PCs to give mobile computing a boost, as well as with smart cards, digital cameras, scanners, DVD players, music players, and USB devices.

Aiming to tackle its toughest competition, it is also designed to scale to high-end, 32-way symmetric multiprocessor servers.

"Next-generation Windows services is services on top of a platform and Windows 2000 is a natural fit that you'd want to run underneath those services," said Brian Valentine, Microsoft senior vice president for Windows. "It really doesn't change where we were going anyway, which was to build a great hosting, business platform that goes to Internet scale. We think of it is a great evolutionary product."

Valentine was at the celebrated Windows 95 launch, and said this one is "bigger."

"It [Windows 95] wasn't as big a launch," he said. "This is a whole show, a whole industry, a whole new platform generation."

Analysts have differed widely on how fast Windows 2000 will be adopted, with most agreeing that the client-side ramp will be faster than the server-side.

"Today, adoption rates are driven by new hardware coming in the door," said Chris Le Tocq, an analyst at GartnerGroup. "The amount of people replacing an OS with a new OS on an existing system is a small portion of the total. So the question is: When is an organization ready to pay money for a new PC and retire an old PC, which is a lot more effort and expense than just theoretically putting the new OS in?'"

After a live performance by Santana, which also played at a Microsoft-sponsored benefit Thursday, Microsoft's most ambitious commercial operating environment is officially in the hands of market dynamics and the stringent demands of IT professionals.