“The most significant development on all of these fronts,
surprisingly, will not come from one company-Microsoft. Barring any
last-minute delays, Microsoft’s long-awaited Windows 2000 operating
system, which promises to bring increased scalability and
reliability compared with the existing Windows NT 4, will finally
ship in February. But there will be numerous options in addition to
Windows 2000. Linux will continue to progress as a viable
alternative to both Windows and Unix. New versions of Unix will
ship. And Intel will release its first 64-bit chip-the Itanium
processor.”
“The next year holds a lot of technical nuggets for anyone in
the dotcom business,” said Michael Todd, vice president of
technology for Scour Inc., a consumer portal of multimedia sites.
For its part, Scour plans to bet big on Linux. “We are looking
forward to a better file system, more robust symmetric
multiprocessing (SMP) support and better management tools-things,
in short, that make Linux scale to an enterprise role….”
“The real [challenge] is for Linux to take on enterprise
tasks,” Weiss said. “It’s not clear if Linux is what you want to
run your business on. I doubt that will change in 2000.“