Microsoft plans to use an analyst meeting Thursday to tout, among other things, strong sales of its Windows Server 2003 operating system. In the first 90 days since the operating system went on sale, the company has sold more than three times as many copies as the server version of Windows 2000 sold during its first three months, said Bob O'Brien, group product manager for Microsoft's Windows Server division. "That's like great…especially in this economy," O'Brien said in an interview here.

The fact that Windows 2003 outsold its predecessors is a factor of many things, including new licensing programs in which some companies have already, in essence, paid for the upgrade. Essentially the decision to upgrade is more a question of whether the software is ready for prime time, rather than a financial decision. And most customers are still in the testing phase, with plans to migrate most servers still several months away, at least. At the same time, server software sales were up significantly in the last quarter, generating $1.93 billion in revenue, up from $1.64 billion in the same quarter a year ago. And Microsoft is counting on Windows Server 2003 to spur upgrades from large companies, many of which are running the 7-year-old Windows NT 4 server OS. Analysts have predicted that a good part of Server 2003 sales will come from companies using NT 4.