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By Sarah Left, 17 December 1999 00:25

NEWS Senior industry figures had a mixed reception to Microsoft's announcement to ship Windows 2000 operating system to manufacturers. The company announced this week the code is complete and beta testers have signed-off on the product as 'ready-to-ship'. Jim Allchin, group vice president of Microsoft's platforms division, said: "We promised we wouldn't ship Windows 2000 until customers said it was ready. We have now met or exceeded all of the criteria." But opinion was divided among industry experts speaking to Silicon.com yesterday about whether or not the operating system was ready for release to the public. Martin Butler, CEO of the Butler Group, said IT directors will see benefits from upgrading. "I've been using Windows 2000 for four months and I haven't seen a blue screen yet," he said. "It's easier to install than NT4 and more functional. It's easier for me to have Outlook open, to be messing with a graphic, to do a whole lot of things at one time. I couldn't do that before, because it would fall over or slow down." But Richard Sykes, chairman of outsourcing consultancy, Morgan Chambers, said: "If Microsoft has it right the first time, like they say they have, it will be a miraculous development." He said users only care about whether it works right out of the box, and he is sceptical about Microsoft's claims that customers say it is ready. "It will be an amazing departure for an industry that has had it wrong so often in the past," he added. David Taylor, president of Certus, an association of UK IT directors, said: "There's been a lot of uncertainty among IT directors about Windows 2000. If it is bug-free - and they're not being used for beta testing as seems to have happened with so many other versions of Windows - then it is logical for them to upgrade. It's the path most of them will choose." Windows 2000 will be available to users from 17 February 2000.