It’s years late, and few consumers will want or need it. But Windows 2000 is a reasonably significant milestone (Mercury News story) for Microsoft and the computer industry.
First, Windows 2000 is a worthwhile upgrade for people who are running Windows NT today. Or it will be after one or two “service pack” releases that fix some of the more than 63,000 bugs (ZDNet story) in the product being shipped to customers. (The fact that this bug count isn’t a huge scandal is scandalous in itself.)
I’m running it on one computer at home. There were a few small installation problems, and one unrecognized piece of equipment. It seems stable enough, probably the best feature of all for anything called Windows.
Consumers can pretty much ignore this product for now, says Mike Langberg, computing editor for the Mercury News. I agree.
Brill’s Misguided New Content
Like many other people in the journalism business I read and respect Brill’s Content, a magazine that casts a skeptical eye on journalism methods and ethics. We don’t cover our own business nearly well enough, and the magazine, while often a bit preachy, does a much needed job.
But Steve Brill, the man behind the magazine, has taken his company into a new online venture that flagrantly breaks the ethical rules, as this story in Online Journalism Review notes. Brill, sadly, seems utterly clueless on his own raging conflict of interest here.