NT2000

Last wednesday, Microsoft President Ballmer made his first significant and
most awaited NT2000 press release in Los Angeles, before a crowd of 400
eager journalists.

Ballmer unveiled the new outlines of what he called "the third revolution
in computing, after DOS and the Registry Editor," namely the yet-to-come
Microsoft OS.

The first thing he taught the assembly was that NT2000 doesn't take its name
from the new millenium, but from the number of 'implemented' bugs. "Over
the time," he said, "Windows has had an increasing bad reputation with
regards to reliability. Under the new management," he emphasized somewhat
pompously, "it is time this comes to an end."

The message is clear. With NT2000, Microsoft introduces a new concept in
IT: guaranteed quality. To sum it up quickly, every purchase will be
accompanied with a certificate ensuring the product comes with 2000 severity
one bugs, no more, no less. Brian Barnes of the Boston Globe raised an
interesting issue: "This is only the top of the iceberg," he claimed. "What
about the zillion uncharted bugs wandering through the system?"

Clearly Ballmer had a definite anticipated solution: "The 'features' you are
mentionning will not make the chip freeze, it's our commitment. And THIS is
the KEY point", he added.

Then Ballmer stated the sizeable step forward would also mean the end of
upgrades, another great relief to the average customer. "People have come
to hate service packs, because there are so many of them," he admitted.
"Since our developers have total control over the number of critical
problems in the kernel, there is no need for further fixes."

Redmonds chief exec estimated proudly that a new version of the OS would not
be planned before year 2014. But the major scoop had not come into play:
Ballmer waited for applauses to fade away, then calmly explained that "The
2000 trouble sources are actually so well understood our teams have designed
tools that take proactive action when a machine gets close to an unstable
limit: monitors turn the system off minute before it crashes."

This is of unvaluable interest to mission-critical systems: Microsoft has
already signed billion dollars partnership contracts with leading software
manufacturers, such as Oracle. An Oracle top executive invited by Microsoft
pointed out that "thanks to NT2000 new technology, Oracle servers can be
shutdown neatly over extended periods of time to avoid data inconsistencies
that may result from a system crash. The new mechanism is of unprecedented
importance during peak hours, when the system load gets so intensive that
crashes are most likely to happen."

To conclude the lecture, Kate Farmer from Wired asked whether NT2000 would
be officially launched on January, 1, 2000. "Unfortunately not," Ballmer
replied. "This is mainly due to the fact the OS will not be Y2K compliant.
Especially, it will not handle the 29th february transition properly, so we
will simply wait for March, 1st."

Someone I cannot remember asked rightfully why the problem won't be
corrected. Ballmer ended the show by saying that "fixing the 'feature'
would reduce the number of bugs down to 1999. Marketing reasons prevent
us from calling our system NT1999."