Still pondering whether to buy Windows 2000? There are a billion reasons why you should not wait.

Just Get It

Still pondering whether to buy Windows 2000? There are a billion reasons why you should not wait.

• By Em C. Pea
• 03/01/2000

Auntie and Fabio don’t do Winter very well. By this point, we’ve looted the survival shelter of all the beluga and smoked oysters, we’re tired of the pretentious petit syrah we stocked up on in November, and we’ve decided that Martha Stewart is an unmistakable harbinger of the apocalypse we didn’t have on January 1.

It’s a good thing Microsoft pushed Windows 2000’s release back to now. At a basic, instinctive level, you know that Win2K is fun. It comes with all sorts of new tools, features, and architectural components. It doesn’t crash as often as Windows NT (I ran Release Candidates on non-HCL systems for months without a single bluescreen). It’s more manageable. And, you can bill more than the GNP of many nations migrating your customers to it.

So listen carefully: BUY WINDOWS 2000 PRO AND SERVER NOW.

If you haven’t gotten under the hood of this OS yet, you’re far behind the curve. Thousands of MCPs have been working with Win2K since Beta 1 was released some time during, I believe, the Carter administration. Betas and Release Candidates were so easy to come by that our cat received three copies of RC2, with a personal note from Steve Ballmer.

Buy Win2K because it’s your livelihood. The time will come when Microsoft totally pulls the rug out from under NT—no support, no bug fixes, no nada. You must get to know Win2K. For one thing, your certification will depend on it. For another, your employer or customers won’t stay on NT forever. Finally, migrating an organization to Win2K is such a finicky task that you can’t get away with just learning about it from a book. If you don’t have hands-on time with Win2K, you can’t learn enough about it to migrate to or administer it effectively.

If you were a good student, you could learn enough about NT to get by on the job until you could round out your skill set. Win2K is more complex by an order of magnitude. Don’t even begin to develop migration strategies until you’ve worked with it on a test LAN for a couple of months. See how it behaves. See what happens to your bandwidth when you implement all those nice new features in the OS. How much of a hit are you prepared to accept in exchange for implementing IPSec? Program components that don’t load until the first time they’re used are a nice concept, but how will users react? Can you create coherent policies in an organization where business policies change every time the company’s stock drops? And what do you with that custom 16-bit inventory application?

If designing an NT organizational structure was a two-dimensional exercise, architecting a Win2K org is an adventure in multidimensional geometry, and there ain’t no Vulcan science officer or perky yeoman to help you come up with useful plans for all those namespaces. The only way to successfully master this OS is to live it, breathe it, eat it, and sleep it.

So you might as well have fun while you’re absorbing it all. Just remember; the more you know about Win2K, the more you’ll be in demand, and the better your personal bottom line will be. Isn’t that why you became an MCP in the first place?