But NTSB officials said they are in no rush to upgrade to Windows 98. We used to be bleeding-edge. We're understaffed, and we don't want our work disrupted. NTSB will upgrade, however, to Microsoft Office 98 from Office 97. Win98 is an incremental upgrade over Win95, so Microsoft Corp. has taken a more low-key marketing approach than it did for Win95's launch, said Chris Barker, an architectural engineer at Microsoft's federal group in Washington.
Federal response appears to be commensurately low-key.
An informal survey of federal agency systems managers found none planning to roll out Win98 in the near term. NT Workstation has better security, stability and integration with network operating systems, said Manuel Perez, a network administrator. He said 80 percent of the 300 PCs in his department now run NT 4.0. But Perez said he will try out Win98 on notebook PCs because it may work better there than NT 4.0 does. Other federal organizations that have selected NT Workstation 4.0 as their standard desktop OS include the Navy, Social Security Administration and State Department, officials of those agencies said.