Microsoft Corp will set the stage for an early June rollout of Windows 98, the last incarnation of its Windows-DOS product, at a worldwide marketing event scheduled for April 4th designed to raise the hype to a fever pitch. The $80 software is expected to be available from PC makers and retail outlets at the same time; a $40 add-on pack of utilities, games and Active technologies will be offered for use with it. It includes Internet Explorer 4.0, better internet sign-on, a link to Microsoft’s web site to automatically restore lost or corrupted files, a saving of 30% disk space using a new FACT 32 file format, faster application look-up and better 3D performance via DirectX 5 (with a 6.0 release coming). Microsoft told Deutsche Morgan Grenfell analyst Michael Kwatinetz it expects Windows 98 to run games faster than 32-bit Nintendo or Sega devices, but not Nintendo 64.
64-bit NT 5.0 delayed six months
The next beta of Windows NT 5.0 will ship in July or August with simultaneous production releases of server and workstation versions now expected in December or January 1999. NT 5.0 has 31 million lines of code compared with NT 4.0’s 16 million and Windows 95’s 11 million. 250 early betas will be given out at a mid-March meeting; five large users, including Microsoft itself are expected to go to full production rollouts soon after. Its haste to get NT 5.0 out of the door – which DMG says is Microsoft’s most important product since Windows 3.0 eight years ago – Microsoft has put the 64-bit version of NT back six months or so. Also missing from initial versions will be games and graphics, to be added later in 1999. Microsoft’s NT revenue stream is doubling at every point and OEM sales, mostly of NT Workstation, are forecast to grow at a compound rate of 30% over NT 4.x. An NT Lite will service users that don’t want the full- blown NT in lieu of another Windows desktop. Microsoft will make a big deal of 64-bit memory addressing and directory services in its marketing campaign against Unix. Wolfpack clustering for four nodes will ship at the same time or within 30 to 60 days of NT 5.0 general availability. Another beta of Sphinx – SQL Server 7.0 – is expected in June following a beta code drop to some 1,500 developers last month (CI No 3,356). 7.0 includes more natural language query support, intelligent caching, 3D data analysis and data transformation but not, it appears, full-scale data warehousing capabilities. Training centers will be established in May. Compaq, SAP and other will offer products pre-packaged with SQL Server 7.0. 6.5 data will need to be unloaded and reloaded into 7.0. Microsoft will make a big play for interoperability by showing how difficult it is for third party products to work with its chief rival, Oracle Corp, which does not publish its protocols.
Abandon SmartSuite?
Microsoft Office has 70 million installs – 30 million of them Office 97. Microsoft believes there are only 20 million competitive products installed all told and that it has 80% of OEM sales. It is only IBM Corp’s bundling of Lotus SmartSuite with its PCs that’s holding back a larger Office market number. DMG thinks IBM’s bundling policy may even be hurting revenue as users opt for other products which come with Office. It expects IBM to abandon SmartSuite development going forward. The bank estimates Microsoft gets $50 for each Office 97 shipped versus IBM’s $5 for SmartSuite and zero for Corel Corp’s WordPerfect. Office 99 is expected in spring of next year. Microsoft claims to be out-selling Netscape two-to-one on web severs, although the Apache freeware is by far the market leader.
