The Short, Happy Life of Windows 2000

by Trevor Bauknight

Published on this site: June 13th, 2005 - See more articles from this month...

At the end of this month, all versions of Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system move from "mainstream support" to "extended support." That's no big deal, in and of itself, according to Microsoft's Lifecycle Support page essentially, the warranty is up, but security fixes will continue to be supplied via Windows Update for at least two years and paid support is still available. A recent posting on the IEBlog (http://blogs.msdn.com/..../422721.aspx), a weblog run by the Internet Explorer development team, however, effectively pulls the trigger on Win2K just as the OS, after nearly six years of severe growing pains, is beginning to find its feet.

A May 27 posting by Chris Wilson refers to the statement in the Lifecycle policy that reads "Microsoft will not accept requests for warranty support, design changes, or new features during the Extended support phase" and then goes on to state that "it should come as no surprise that we do not plan to release IE7 for Windows 2000." As evidenced by the hundreds of mostly irate comments from web developers who frequent the blog, it came as a surprise.

The gist of many of the comments was that if IE7 was wedded so closely to the OS that it can't be made to run on version 5.0 of an OS now officially at 5.1 while alternative browsers like Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox), with more security and more features, do so easily, then perhaps poor engineering decisions were made when the browser was made "part of the OS" during Microsoft's bout with the Justice Dept.

That's putting it politely. The idea that meaningful security updates will be applied to an OS that still has the reviled security nightmare that is IE6 tightly bolted on is laughable. Add to that the fact that the tens of millions of Win2K installations, many of them in large corporate environments that are sometimes still completing transitions *to* Win2K, ensure that web developers will need to continue to support the utter mess of browser incompatibilities well into the future.

Microsoft's Subscription Model

Some of the responses to Wilson's blog entry questioned why Win2K users don't simply upgrade to Windows XP, and keeping your individual PCs current is something that we at CafeID http://www.cafeid.com generally recommend. However, in large, corporate environments, the IT department is well-advised to avoid updating massive numbers of installations unless there is a compelling reason to do so and until the replacement is as proven as what is being replaced. Many such organizations skipped XP entirely because, until SP2, it simply didn't
offer any real advantages to business customers over Win2K.

Now, those same businesses are being asked, even pressured, to transition from a six-year-old OS to a four-year-old OS whose only real advantage for most users is that SP2 includes security enhancements to help protect it from a relentless onslaught of malicious probing that can bring an Internet-connected PC to its knees, sick with malware, before you can even complete the download of the Service Pack in question. And they're being asked to make that transition again with Microsoft's Next Big Thing, code-named Longhorn, due only 18 months later (about the same time, perhaps coincidentally, that Windows XP was supposed to drop into "extended support" status).

It's becoming painfully obvious that Microsoft is beginning to move its customers into a rigid, de facto subscription arrangement in which fixes and "enhancements" (the kind that give support personnel ulcers) are rolled out automatically and without regard to the viability or stability of existing installations. We wonder about the implementation of such a model by a company that hasn't updated Win2K since Service Pack 4 was released in mid-2003 and that currently has no concrete plans to update the current OS until late next year or even early 2007.

To be fair, the urgent need to get Longhorn out the door is part of the reason that IE7 will only be available for XP SP2 or better. The entire Longhorn development team was taken off that project for some 10 months in order to finish SP2 for XP because SP2 was such an extensive rewrite of XP. Some of the changes made at that time have, according to Microsoft's Bruce Morgan, made backporting them to Win2K a larger task than the company feels justified in tackling.

What Are the Alternatives?

Many of the responses to the IEBlog posting were very simple and direct: "No IE7 on Win2K? Ok, fine...I'll just insist that the hundreds of users my IT department serves run Firefox." Indeed, it may be that this is an opportunity for the excellent browser from the Mozilla team to pick up some marketshare. After all, there will be "tens of millions" of Win2K users stuck with a buggy, non-standards-compliant and insecure Microsoft web browser that's bolted so tightly onto the OS that you can scarcely remove it (and even if you could, you'd have no way to access Windows Update).

Apple's announcement Monday (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html) that it will begin to transition to Intel processors (the ones at the heart of Windows machines) accompanied by the revelation that Apple has been developing OS X for the Intel architecture secretly in parallel with its public development for the past five years may signify that Apple is ready to go head-to-head with Microsoft on the desktop. And while Apple has demonstrated a distinct subscription-model tendency of its own in recent years, its software is head and shoulders above anything that has come out of Redmond in terms of usability, security and stability, and much of what makes OS X such an appealing platform is part of its open-source Darwin core.

For many businesses faced with the inevitable prospect of moving a large number of PCs to a different OS, the option of moving to Linux is also growing increasingly attractive. The platform being built by the Free/Open Source Software community is still a little behind even Microsoft when it comes to usability; but a concerted effort is underway to change that, and it's happening much faster in the open, distributed development environment than it is in Redmond. Check out the Linux.org website (http://www.linux.org) for more information on the possibilities.

Why Kill Windows 2000?

Microsoft insists that Win2K users will continue to receive security enhancements and support, but without the ability to upgrade the insecure built-in web browser, the other security enhancements are little more than window dressing. It has taken the corporate world a long time to make the transition from the early Windows 95/98 platform to the NT-based platform, and now Redmond is simply asking those same customers to forget the traumatic security nightmare they experienced with Windows 2000 for the first several years and shell out millions of dollars again.

It seems counterintuitive, but Microsoft has to keep its customers moving in order to maintain the inertia that keeps itself moving. But more and more often, business customers are investigating alternatives to Microsoft dependence, and decisions like not releasing an update to IE for tens of millions of corporate customers content with using what finally works seem like a quick way to drive those customers away.

The IT world has changed in the last five years, and though it took Windows 2000 a long time to catch up with those changes, it has done so in spite of itself and now ably shoulders the burden of a large percentage of corporate desktop computing. One of the changes, however, is that Windows 2000 users have alternatives they didn't have before.

The Open Source world, and particularly the combination of Linux, the Mozilla family of products and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, represents a compelling alternative to Windows that will allow IT departments a great deal of flexibility in using what works and upgrading what needs to be improved without the kind of headaches involved in chucking a viable, mature OS out the door in order to provide its users with a decent web browser.

Trevor Bauknight is a web designer and writer with over 15 years of
experience on the Internet. He specializes in the creation and maintenance of business and personal identity online and can be reached at [email protected]. Stop by http://www.cafeid.com for a free tryout of the revolutionary SiteBuildingSystem and check out our Flash-based website and IMAP e-mail hosting solutions, complete with live support.