By John D. Ruley
OK, Microsoft still won't give out numbers for Windows NT. But
it does give some clues.
First, chairman and CEO Bill Gates said at the Internet Professional
Developers Conference, "With memory prices coming down, NT
will become a really huge part of the Windows market." Echoing
his boss, Desktop and Business Systems Division vice president
Jim Allchin said his biggest concern is "getting NT and Windows
95 synched up."
There may even be too many statistics. One Microsoft news release
claimed NT Server will account for some "25 percent of worldwide
server operating system shipments by June ... [an increase] of
more than 100 percent," and that the run rate should exceed
that of Novell NetWare 4.1 by the time you read this. Researcher
International Data Corp. reports that in 1995, NT Server accounted
for 15.7 percent of all file server nodes-up from 6.7 percent
in 1994. In a study Microsoft commissioned last year of organizations
with 50-plus employees, research firm MSI International found
that "63 percent of organizations surveyed began evaluating
or deploying the Windows 95 or Windows NT Workstation operating
system by the end of 1995." Finally, the Meta Group predicts
NT will command 30 percent of the Web application server market
by 1998.
So here goes: The NetWare server and Web application server markets
each have annual run rates in the hundreds of thousands-and Microsoft
officials say the NT Workstation run rate is "on the order
of" 10 times the NT Server run rate. In sum, the total run
rate should be several million this year. (There are also hints
the pace is picking up; according to one utility vendor, "Interest
in an NT version of our product has doubled in the last 90 days.")
In the long term, Steve Madigan, Micro-soft's new director of
program management, expects today's technology split between NT
and Win95 at the low end to disappear. "It's technically
possible for Microsoft to build all releases on the NT platform
by 1998," he said, "but that doesn't mean we're going
to shove NT down everyone's throat."