Microsoft CEO Bill Gates said today August 25 in Austin, Texas, he was "pretty sure" Windows 2000 would be out the door by the end of the year.

"We are very close to the final shipment," Gates told some 1,200 managers here at Dell Computer Corp.'s DirectConnect conference. "We're pretty sure the builds will go final by the end of the year." Dell Computer Corp.'s DirectConnect user conference may be the first of its kind, but the keynote that kicked it off Wednesday was not. Instead, Dell CEO Michael Dell hammered home the tried but true message that the Internet is fundamentally changing the industry.

Microsoft is working with Dell to develop several new technologies for end-to-end direct business that leverage the Internet. Some of these new capabilities include handwriting recognition, voice interaction for e-mail, direct commerce integration and creating an IT help desk over the Internet so users can fix computer problems online rather than calling a technician.

As part of his talk, Gates demonstrated how Windows 2000 will make enterprise management easier. Windows 2000 promises to be more scalable for better load balancing and reliability, he said, enabling IT administrators to deploy applications across all servers.

"It should eliminate the Unix single point of failure issue," he said. " People are expecting everything out of this software that they got from mainframes, plus they want the clustering capability."

Gates also showed off Windows 2000's central management of servers. For example, the OS groups all processes associated with an application for easier manageability.

"Server management is imperative," Gates said, "because you are always going to have a lot of servers. The idea is that you can see the health of all the servers."

 

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