Speaking alongside a 30ft-plus plastic laptop at the Windows 2000 launch in San Francisco, Gates said Windows 2000 was a key platform for ecommerce, especially in the business to business space. GartnerGroup has warned that customers should be wary of using it for hosting ecommerce applications until the end of 2001.
Windows now offers value, choice and time to market.
Gates said that while Windows 95 needed to be rebooted on average every 2.1 days and Windows NT Workstation 4.0 every 5.2 days, an ongoing independent benchmarking test has been running Windows 2000 Professional for 90 days without a reboot. Microsoft is trying to pitch Professional as the new must-have desktop OS for corporate users, while positioning Windows 98 for the consumer market. This will be followed by Windows Millennium in the late summer and will have new digital entertainment and home networking functionality. However, Gartner and other researchers have also advised users to refrain from implementing any of the three versions of Windows 2000 for at least nine months at the desktop and departmental level and for 18 months in large scale systems. But Gates also claimed that Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server could now run on machines with up to 32 processors and support 6,700 concurrent users using SAP's enterprise resource planning application suite and Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 database, which is due to ship later this year.