According to InternetNews, almost half of enterprise desktops are still using Windows 2000. There is good reason for that since Windows 2000 is quite stable, user friendly and functional once all the patches are loaded, (for a Microsoft platform anyway.) Not only that but it isn’t wasting precious hardware cycles on eye candy like Windows XP has a tendency to do and it doesn’t have the same hardware requirements as XP SP2 either.
Microsoft’s recent push to provide a much needed update to Internet Explorer is going to leave these users in the lurch as IE6 is still the last browser update they will receive from Microsoft (IE 7 is a XP SP2 and above only update). This might be part of Microsoft’s plan to convince these enterprise businesses to upgrade their Operating System when Longhorn comes out or before, but since Longhorn (or even XP SP2) has such higher hardware requirements, the upgrade will essentially mean totally new computers and many large businesses are likely balk at the idea of so big a financial outlay.
As long as new applications support Windows 2000, there isn’t really any need to rush out and upgrade anyway as most of the functionality is available from third parties and much of it is free. Firefox is a better replacement for Internet Explorer and already has most or all of the features that IE7 will ship with. It’s also available for free and has a much better security record then Internet Explorer, (In part because it is allot newer, but that’s a whole other issue.) Best of all, Firefox is not only available for Windows 2000, it also runs quite happily on Windows 98 and ME as well. Desktop search is one of the other touted features of Longhorn but you can get most of those same features by installing Google desktop search which is also free and even a version of Google desktop search for enterprise.
