Despite Microsoft stock being rocked by skepticism about the platform, Bill Gates says the long-awaited Windows 2000 will be "dramatically more reliable" than other Microsoft releases.
Speaking to NBC, Gates says Win2K is Microsoft's most important product since Windows 95. "We have come up with breakthrough ways to assure the reliability," said Gates of the product that cost $1 billion to develop.
Microsoft planned to launch Win2K later Feb. 17 at a San Francisco gala. ,
A Gartner Group research report questioning Win2K's speed, security, and compatibility to existing software sent Microsoft stock teetering in the previous week, Reuters says. Gates, though, says Win2K was tested on 300 customers and received "very positive" feedback. He also says that there was no major security trouble found on the platform.
"This is going to be one that people are glad they moved up to," he told NBC's The Today Show.
He calls Win2K's launch a very key event, but that was all he would say about whether Windows products mean 40 percent of Microsoft's fiscal 2000 profits.
But even as Microsoft continues working out a solution to the government's antitrust finding against the company, the European Union has begun probing Win2K, Reuters says. The EU wants to know if Win2K breaks EU competition law by letting Microsoft extend its personal computer dominance "unfairly," Reuters says.
ZDNet analyst Peter Coffee has a small shard of skepticism about Win2K. He says a Microsoft memo identified "some 63,000 potential problems to be addressed" in the product, though with less than two defects per thousand lines of code Win2K measures up as 80 percent better than analysts ordinarily suggest as the sign of a ground-up redesign need.
"But it's Microsoft's stockholders who have the most reason to be troubled by the notion that defects are acceptable in a shipping software product and that fixing them in a subsequent release is a viable strategy," Coffee says. "One Microsoft comment on the 63,000-bug memo was that 'bugs are inherent in computer science,' which is patently false in theory and bad economics in practice."
He says most repair costs after software rollouts go three to ten times higher than what defect prevention costs and "50 to 200 times as great as the cost" of "more rigorous requirements definition" before a software maker even starts coding. He thinks if Microsoft has to ship and fix, it could cost the software giant an extra $40-60 million, compared with defect prevention.
And Microsoft would also "face revenue delays due to poor customer confidence in the company's initial releases -- not to mention loss of customers to other platforms, such as AS/400, that have solid reputations for getting it right the first time," Coffee says.
