“Customers who want to use Microsoft Corp.’s new operating
system should be willing to sacrifice incompatible hardware and
software or accept the fact that the best parts of Windows 2000
won’t work.”
“Windows 3.x, 95, 98, MS-DOS and OS/2 clients won’t take
advantage of critical features such as Microsoft’s new Active
Directory global directory service. If information technology
managers need those capabilities on the desktop, Microsoft
generally has one solution: Upgrade to Windows 2000. The new
operating system will balk at installing on top of non-Windows
2000-compliant hardware or applications.
“Microsoft Senior Vice President Jim Allchin insists that IT
departments’ overwhelming need for reliability mandated what some
might call the abandonment of a large, installed base of corporate
PC users. “We hope we don’t have to sacrifice too much
compatibility,” Allchin says. But “If it comes down to a hard
trade-off, we’ll come down on the side of reliability. Users just
want reliable, simple computing,” he says.”