“The Wintel alliance appears to be moving towards a converged
story on Itanium and 64-bit Windows. Neither of them looks capable
of shipping a product to spec and to schedule but – ahem – maybe
neither of them cares, because it’s not important after all.”
“…Itanium being downgraded into a development platform
certainly throws Redmond a substantial lifebelt. … As it’s
not in beta yet, we’re clearly talking late here, and that would be
a serious issue if Itanium were important; the spectre of Linux
and the Unices grabbing all the mission critical 64-bit server
business while Win64 staggered would no doubt be haunting
Microsoft.”
“But if it’s not important, Microsoft can make up lost ground by
McKinley, which won’t be an issue until 2002, and as an added extra
it can cheer itself up at the thought of all that misplaced
development effort by SCO, Trillian et al.”