Or that it will be pretty to watch. Here's what's really going on. It claimed it would eventually have Something Even Better, in hopes customers would be afraid to buy until they had seen it. But Microsoft doesn't have enough credibility in the networking space. And so it was forced into an alliance with Cisco, the 800-pound gorilla of the internetworking world.
Huge bucks are at stake.
Microsoft and Cisco will gang up on Novell first. Then they'll turn their brute force to Netscape, which just released a beta version of its own directory server. But don't expect the partnership to last very long, because both companies are simultaneously determined to destroy each other. Microsoft wants to build routing functions into Windows NT, rendering Cisco's core products unnecessary. Rendering Windows irrelevant.