More Top Picks Best Clamps For Furniture Glue Ups
player ready...Microsoft last week changed its delivery schedule for Windows NT 5.0 again, prompting a flurry of analyst commentaries and a momentary cooling of its hot stock price.
The Redmond, Wash., software maker told a conference of information-technology specialists in San Jose it plans to ship the second beta, or test, version of NT 5.0 by summer’s end. In November, it had said the beta would be available no later than June 30.
The delay caused concerns among analysts, but Microsoft called it a tempest in an NT pot.
“People here are totally excited about NT 5.0,” said Yusuf Mehdi, a Windows marketing manager. More than 2,500 technologists representing several hundred companies attended the conference, aimed at bringing corporations up to date on Microsoft’s NT strategy.
Mehdi said the company will have no problem meeting a summer date for beta 2. It then will issue a series of interim versions before releasing beta 3, which it will make broadly available to the public for testing.
The broad beta undoubtedly will help identify more bugs in the NT code, but it also may slow delivery of the final product, analysts said.
NT 5.0 is considered Microsoft’s most important upgrade since Windows 95 in August 1995, because many corporate customers are bypassing Windows 98 in favor of NT. Windows 98 is being marketed by Microsoft primarily as a consumer product.
NT is aimed at corporations seeking to move data and services to networks and the Internet to share with customers, partners and vendors.
Analysts expressed concerns over NT’s delay but generally held their ratings at “buy.”
Microsoft has studiously avoided predicting a ship date for NT 5.0, saying it prefers to ensure most bugs are taken care of before releasing the program. Some analysts speculated it may be the second half of 1999 before the program ships.
Widespread adoption is not expected for six months to a year after then.
“We expect this NT 5.0 slippage will negatively impact large enterprise, higher performance NT application sales . . . in favor of Unix alternatives,” said David Readerman, a longtime Microsoft analyst with NationsBanc Montgomery Securities.
Readerman maintained a buy rating, but lowered his fiscal year 1999 earnings estimates of NT sales from $3.6 billion to $2.9 billion.
Also maintaining a buy rating was Michael Kwatinetz of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. Counterbalancing NT’s slippage, Kwatinetz noted, will be better-than-expected sales of Windows 98, which reached half a million copies in its first three days, and an earlier-than-expected release of the forthcoming Office 2000 application suite, moved up to next spring.
Besides its Internet capabilities, NT 5.0’s attractions include lowering the cost of desktop computers for large enterprises–by being simpler to use and maintain–and a technology called IntelliMirror, which synchronizes data between remote or desktop computers and network servers.
NT also offers powerful e-mail and database programs called Exchange and SQL Server, as well as a network directory, Active Directory, that enables users to look up one another, and systems administrators to customize services based on individual users’ needs.