Thanks Christopher for sending in this one. The Windows .Net Server operating system probably will reach customers" hands sometime next year, and its successor will go "beyond 2003," Jim Allchin, Microsoft Corp."s group vice president of platforms, said yesterday.
Allchin told attendees to the company"s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference 2002 in Seattle that he expects Windows .Net Server to be released "later this calendar year, from at least a manufacturing perspective" -- in line with the company"s most recent predictions issued early last month.
But Allchin"s statement that the server software product probably will be in customer"s hands sometime next year could represent a "big slip," according to Tom Bittman, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. Bittman said he expects Windows .Net Server to be released to manufacturers in September or October, meaning the shipped product could be in customers" hands by the end of the year.
Further slippage certainly wouldn"t be unprecedented for the new Windows server operating system, which originally had been scheduled to ship at the same time as the Windows XP desktop operating system. Windows XP shipped last October, but the server operating system"s release date slid to the first half of this year and then to the second half of this year.
The company"s Trustworthy Computing security initiative -- which, in part, calls for an extensive security review of all products -- has been cited as one reason for the delay. But Bittman said Microsoft also has encountered some challenges building its .Net development framework into products.