Microsoft Corp is expected to by-pass the formality of a press conference for the announcement of Windows NT in two weeks. Bill Gates will supposedly do the honours himself in his Windows World keynote address. Atlanta, Georgia, the show site, will apparently be all dolled up for the festivities with billboards, local advertising, the works. Meanwhile, the boys and girls at Microsoft are working 70- and 80-hour weeks trying to get NT out as soon as possible. At 8:30 pm the parking lots outside the NT buildings on the Microsoft campus are observed to be 80% to 90% full. Travel plans have been curtailed so people can focus on the imminent launch later this month and people who have visted Redmond over the last 11 years say they’ve never seen the intensity level so high. Faced with lingering criticisms that NT is still fat and slow, they’re doing lots of performance tuning and debugging, which of course leads to the burning issue of when NT will actually be shipped. Microsoft senior vice-president Paul Maritz told Compaq Computer Corp he was expecting NT to ship by the end of June and Sequent Computer Systems Inc was told pretty much the same. However as of May 3 the code had not been frozen. Once it is frozen, OEM customers estimate it will take another six to eight weeks for independent software vendors to get their applications into distribution channels. NT manufacture should ramp up relatively quickly using compact disks.
