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XP has landed

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 25 Oct 2001 17:22 BST

Windows 2000, says Steve Ballmer, "wasn't finished." Windows XP, he implies, is finished. For once, I almost believe him - despite the fact that I know damn well I'm going to be writing stories about faults and failings in XP over the next months.

But boy, has it taken him a long time to confess to something that was painfully obvious years ago. I almost don't mind, because at last, he's done it; and it may be the biggest breakthrough ever, in Microsoft's attitude to the world.

We'll know soon, when Microsoft comes clean about what it is going to do about the 64-bit Intel processor family.

What Microsoft had hoped to do with Win 2K, was to provide something which ran all existing Windows software, but did it reliably. What it actually did, was tell fibs, and pretend it had done it when it hadn't.

The project started out with the name of Windows NT version 5.0 and it rapidly became apparent to everybody except Ballmer's office that it was never going to be ready on time. When it was finally shipped as Windows 2000, it was something like 18 months late from the "absolutely final, positive, can't be later than that" deadline Ballmer had originally announced.

There was only one way that could happen. Ballmer and his vice-presidential acolytes were simply ignoring what everybody in the Redmond programming team was saying.

The lateness of NT5 was simply not a secret. Everybody knew it wasn't going to be ready when Ballmer and Gates said it was.