News
Windows 2000 Finally Here!
Chairman, Chief Software Architect Bill Gates officially unveils Windows 2000 at San Francisco confab.
San Francisco, Calif. -- Introduced by actor Patrick Stewart, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates raised the curtain on Windows 2000 and the family of scalable server software.
Win2K, Gates told us, was the result of a majority of the company's developer personnel -- upwards of about 2,000 -- whose work was scrutinized by a worldwide battery of nearly 750,000 beta testers. Gates anticipates that the development teams will also deliver this year Windows 2000 DataCenter Server, a key component of the company's enterprise strategy, and these products will be close behind in development during the next year:
- Windows 2000 64-bit
- Application Center Server 2000
- Commerce Server 2000
- BizTalk Server 2000
- Host Integration Server 2000
The keynote itself was a series of demonstrations
of Windows 2000 being put through its paces in
enterprise scenarios:
- Win2K Professional, the business desktop, using IntelliMirror to synchronize information on roaming laptops/users.
- 400 Dell workstations making a billion-plus hits against 32 clustered Win2K servers
running a sample e-commerce Web site.
- A 16-way Unisys ES7000 server running a beta of Windows 2000 Datacenter Server.
- Windows 2000 running or being supported by a myriad of desktop and laptop machines, PDAs, and consumer electronics.
Support from third-party vendors was overwhelming, with about 25 tools having met "Windows 2000 Server Certified" status as of this morning. Gates' keynote was delivered to an eyeball estimate of about 6,000 people (Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, where Gates delivered the keynote, has 7,000 seats).
The keynote is available on Microsoft's Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/launch/keynote.asp; the file is approximately 1 hour 30 minutes.