Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/1999/05/07/vp_allchin_says_ms_oses/

VP Allchin says MS OSes worse than Win2k beta

No really, he said it, and he said lots of other weird stuff too. (Read to the bottom for Citrix stock tip)

By John Lettice

Posted in On-Prem, 7th May 1999 09:10 GMT

The 'finished' operating systems Microsoft has been shipping for all those years are less stable than the beta of Windows 2000, says Microsoft senior VP Jim Allchin. Or at least, he's been telling people that Windows 2000 "beta 3 is more solid than any OS we've ever shipped." For example: "In our stress tests, it performs better than NT 4.0 with Service Pack 4." Obviously, friends, we're entering the Irony Twilight Zone (ITZ) here. If beta 3's more solid than what we've already got, why isn't MS shipping it now? Jim also concedes that beta 3 has a "very high" number of bugs in it still, but here in the ITZ we figure this must mean that Windows 98 and NT 4.0 have an even greater number of bugs. Are we missing something here? Worryingly for MS spinmeisters (if they're any good, that is) Allchin was blabbing at one of those softball interview sessions analysts put on to spice up their conferences. This particular one was Gartner Group's NT in the Enterprise, and Jim was shooting the breeze publicly with some Gartner execs. In other highlights, Allchin had a couple of messages for all his and MS' fans in the Linux world. "Linux is Unix... I don't consider it to be very innovative," he said. "The profit motive will end up ruining and tarnishing the altruism people use to promote this thing." There you go Linux people -- you're not very smart, and anyway greed will destroy you. And then there's integration. Does Microsoft glue things together unnecessarily? Hell, no, Microsoft hates integration. First of all it says, "keep it out, we don't want it." But customer pressure forces it to keep putting new stuff in anyway -- pesky things, customers, they can get you busted by the DoJ. And here's one for Citrix stock-holders. Apparently Allchin thinks there might be a chance of Intellimirror, Microsoft's bizarre interpretation of thin client computing, making it big. "We think Intellimirror could end up being much better than Terminal Server, but we don't know yet." Note how loaded that one is. Microsoft was beaten into paying big bucks to Citrix for the technology for Terminal Server, Microsoft doesn't like that, and here we have Allchin telling us how Microsoft proposes to get out of it. ®