A recent Gartner report points up the tensions between the company's objectives and those of its customers, and urges enterprises to pressure Microsoft to put the brakes on its OS obsolescence programme. Microsoft's official policy is only to support two generations of OS at a time, but if the company decides Whistler constitutes a new OS, this would mean the end of NT 4.0 and Win95 in the second half of this year.
As Whistler is intended to be the successor to both Win2k and Win9x, and Microsoft has now put out a new version of Win9x three years in succession, it's surely a racing certainty that Microsoft will decide it's a new operating system, rather than a cleaned-up version of Win2k. Which of course it will be, but those three 'new' consumer OSes in a row were cleaned-up version of Windows 95, right?
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