Last wednesday, Microsoft President Ballmer made
his first significant and most awaited Windows 2000 press
release in Los Angeles, before a crowd of 400 eager
journalists.

Ballmer unveiled the new outlines of what he called
"the third revolution in computing, after DOS and
the Registry Editor", namely the yet-to-come Microsoft OS.
The first thing he taught the assembly was that Windows 2000
doesn't take its name from the new millenium, but from
the number of 'implemented' bugs. "Over the time" he said,
"Windows has had an increasing bad reputation with
regards to reliability. Under the new management", he
emphasized somewhat pompously, "it is time this
comes to an end."

The message is clear. With Windows 2000, Microsoft introduces a
new concept in IT: guaranteed quality. To sum it up quickly,
every purchase will be accompanied with a certificate ensuring
the product comes with 2000 severity one bugs, no more, no less.
Brian Barnes of the Boston Globe raised an interesting issue:
"This is only the top of the iceberg", he claimed. "What about
the zillion uncharted bugs wandering through the system?"
Clearly Ballmer had a definite anticipated solution: "The 'features'
you are mentionning will not make the chip freeze, it's
our commitment. And THIS is the KEY point", he added.
Then Ballmer stated the sizeable step forward would also mean the
end of upgrades, another great relief to the average customer.
"People have come to hate service packs, because there are so many
of them", he admitted. "Since our developers have total control over
the number of critical problems in the kernel, there is no need for
further fixes." Redmonds chief exec estimated proudly that a new version
of the OS would not be planned before year 2014.

But the major scoop had not come into play: Ballmer waited for applauses
to fade away, then calmly explained that "The 2000 trouble sources are
actually so well understood our teams have designed tools that
take proactive action when a machine gets close to an unstable limit:
monitors turn the system off minute before it crashes."

This is of unvaluable interest to mission-critical systems: Microsoft
has already signed billion dollars partnership contracts with leading
software manufacturers, such as Oracle. An Oracle top executive invited
by Microsoft pointed out that "thanks to Windows 2000 new technology, Oracle
servers can be shutdown neatly over extended periods of time to avoid data
inconsistencies that may result from a system crash. The new mechanism
is of unprecedented importance during peak hours, when the system load
gets so intensive that crashes are most likely to happen."

To conclude the lecture, Kate Farmer from Wired asked whether Windows 2000
would be officially launched on January, 1, 2000. "Unfortunately not",
Ballmer replied. "This is mainly due to the fact the OS will not be Y2K
compliant. Especially, it will not handle the 29th february transition
properly, so we will simply wait for March, 1st." Someone I cannot remember
asked rightfully why the problem won't be corrected. Ballmer ended the show
by saying that "fixing the 'feature' would reduce the number of bugs down to
1999. Marketing reasons prevent us from calling our system Windows 1999."