Win2k rollout sliding to February?

Last month teams of Register forensic experts picked over Dell's NT 4.0 upgrade plans and concluded they meant that Windows 2000 would ship in February, at the earliest. So it's with a certain satisfaction that we note that a story from our good friends at ZD with the usual reliable sources today tells us that Win2k will ship in - February. The Register's reasoning in our earlier piece, you'll recall, was that Dell was far too careful about money to offer free upgrades from systems shipping with NT 4.0 for longer than it had to. Dell promised such upgrades to Win2k "through February 2000," and that of course would be entirely pointless if Win2k systems were already shipping in January. Or even December. If Win2k shipped in June, on the other hand, that would be an awful lot of free upgrades for Dell to fulfil. So February it was. At the time this didn't entirely fit with the enthusiastic noises were discreetly being leaked from Redmond and related organisations, and since then we've been getting regular claims that Win2k is on target for the end of this year. But from what the sources are now telling ZD, that means (we said this last month as well - aren't we clever?) that Win2k will RTM (Release To Manufacture) before the end of the year, which means it makes 99, but production and the OEM rollout is Q1 2000. ®