By William Fellows
Microsoft Corp released Windows 2000 Beta 3 (NT 5.0) to manufacturing yesterday, claiming it will provide additional code drops to OEMs and ISVs every five to eight weeks until the production version ships by year-end. Microsoft is shipping full- feature Beta 3 versions of Windows 2000 Professional for workstations, the classic Server version and Advanced Server. The DataCenter cut won’t ship until three to six months after the production version becomes generally available. A 64-bit version may see the light of day next year, though Microsoft was very vague.
The company said the Beta 3 is not really intended for production sites, but in the same breath went on to say there are 23 companies actually moving it into production systems. A slew of OEMs are going to sell systems running it supported by a combination of their own and special Microsoft support programs. Microsoft has 10,000 systems running the Beta 3 on its corporate network and claims one out of three US corporations are going to evaluate it. It expects to ship 650,000 copies. Microsoft said the seven month gap between the August Beta 2 and Beta 3 was simply too long and it didn’t provide timely enough code drops. People got stale between the two, it said. Windows 2000 development began in July 1996 when NT 4 shipped. Microsoft wouldn’t say how many lines of code make up each version.
