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Half Of Businesses Still Use Windows 2000 640
bonch writes "An AssetMetrix study shows that half of business are still running Windows 2000 four years after the release of Windows XP, and that usage of Windows 2000 has only decreased by 4% since 2003. Microsoft will officially stop supporting Windows 2000 by the end of this month, offering one last update rollup later this year. Windows XP's slower adoption illustrates Microsoft's difficulty in competing with the popularity of its own software platform, and makes it more difficult for Microsoft to convince people to upgrade when Longhorn is released late next year."
umm (Score:5, Funny)
Yeak, okay...
Re:umm (Score:5, Funny)
MS lifecycle says it has to be (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out the table. Notice how the licencing end dates run out at the end of this year for OEMs and next year for system builders? Longhorn has to fill that spot or the contracts need to be renegotiated.
Re:umm (Score:2, Insightful)
Even though XP is "nice" I still think (along with many others) that Win2k was probably the "BEST" release M$ has even had. Everything else is simply more eye candy.
MS are in a bit of a pickle really (Score:5, Interesting)
The interesting thing is - what % of businesses are XP? Even if MS get some of the Win2K people to go to XP - how are they going to get the XP people to go to Longhorn? It isn't going to happen extensively!!! MS are actually possibly more screwed (at least in terms of getting people to Longhorn) if they get Win2K people to go to XP at this stage.
And it's still long time to wait for direct Win2K -> Longhorn upgrades (2 years? More? -including evaluation/install time for businesses).
Re:MS are in a bit of a pickle really (Score:4, Informative)
I do not think so. Look, I am writing this from my pffice PC, which is an AMD Athlon XP processor and 512 MB RAM and a 7200 RPM HD
At home I have a Hp Notebook with Windows XP, and a Pentium 4M processor. Same RAM, and same speed HD.
With those configs, I find the Win2K machine like 4 times faster than the WinXP machine.
I think Windows 2000 is very good, as it has [almost] EVERYTHING an OS should have, and with Windows XP Microsoft added other things that I really do not use and surely there are process[services] that are just wasting my memory/CPU.
I have even turned lots of services (with help of the black viper service config guide), but Win2000 continues running smoother.
Re:MS are in a bit of a pickle really (Score:3, Insightful)
But in terms of functionality, it acts like 2K once the happyhappyshiny stuff is disabled - that's the point of my initial sentence. People act like they'll lose all that 2K is by moving to XP, just because of how XP's interface is arranged out of the box (note, in a corporate environment, you don't/shouldn't get "out of the box" anyways).
Re:MS are in a bit of a pickle really (Score:3, Interesting)
I do sysadmin work, and yes, RDP on the desktop is invaluable. Also, being able to Remote to my home machines is also a great tool. Need to test a web, email, whatever server from the outside world? Remote to my home desktop (XP Pro) and then connect from it to the service to be tested. Also, Server 2003 has RDP built in for remote administration, which means that the flat panel/keyboard combo in the rack is collecting
Re:MS are in a bit of a pickle really (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:XP is pure EVIL (Score:3, Insightful)
What does the card not do? Work at all? Did you try installing the drivers that came with the card?
and SP2 destroys the machine's ability to connect to any sort of a network. (Again, a 3com 905 seriese NIC are pretty much unheard of, right?)
Again, neither XP nor 2K worked with my 3C
And the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And the other half? (Score:2)
All of them at my work. Of course that is because we need dos and netware networking support.
I am tryig to figure out an upgrade path. it's just that the software we use is very propertiry. and moving off is possible though hard. That and I refuse to install XP at work. I need an idiot proof server setup, and I haven't found it yet.
Re:And the other half? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And the other half? (Score:2)
From AssetMetrix (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows NT popularity was reduced from 13.5% to about 10%; and
Windows XP became the most popular operating system for companies with fewer than 250 PCs."
I don't think ME was ever popularly deployed in businesses. I shudder to think about it. Win2k was available then.
not 'other half', same half. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not half the computers. By the wording, one computer still running out of a company w/ 500 computers would still count as 'running Windows 2000'. So, it's entirely possible for that same half (and even some from the other half) to be running windows3.1, and still count as 'running Windows 2000'.
Of course, if you look at the AssetMatrix site, they say
Unfortunately, my quick gla
Re:And the other half? (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of the desk workstations where I work do run Win2K It's what came with them and the license is corporate wide. It isn't broken (If you don't count annoyances such as IE and
Officially? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Officially? (Score:5, Informative)
Mainstream
* Paid-per-incident support
* Free hotfix support
Is what expires next month.
Re:Officially? (Score:3, Informative)
If you're running Windows 2000 Server you have till March 31, 2010 to move to whatever OS you choose. I'm personally waiting to evaluate OS X on Intel hardware. I was getting ready to port our web offerings to OS X on PPC/XServes but now I'll just wait until the new offerings hit the market. JSP here I come...
Not troll - support exists until 2010. (Score:4, Informative)
Additionally, Microsoft will continue to release security fixes for Windows 2000 for several more years - they still release patches for Windows 98 now.
It won't change much for most people.
At my company, we've got several hundred servers running Windows 2000 still. IIS6 in IIS5 compatibility mode isn't perfect, and IIS6 in native mode breaks a lot of apps. And there's a ton of other little gotchas with Windows Server 2003 - Can't run Exchange 2000 on it, can't run a lot of 3rd party software, etc etc. It's not an extremely hard upgrade but like any other major upgrade it's a lot of preparation.
Why upgrade? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:5, Insightful)
And here is Microsoft's biggest problem. There comes a point when the extra bells and whistles just aren't worth it. Then they have to find a way to get you to buy anyway. Microsoft is painfully aware of this... witness their licensing schemes, and premature end of support for products.
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:5, Informative)
This is unlike Redhat, which EOL'ed Red Hat 9 after less than a year it was out.
Microsoft will still release security fixes, and they have done this with 98 and NT.
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:4, Insightful)
When a new pc comes in, regardless of the "OEM" license, we have a site license for Win2k, and we use it. Not that XP Pro wouldn't work just as well; it would just take too much testing to move to that release.
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:3, Informative)
From http://www.redhat.com/software/subscriptions.html [redhat.com] ...
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:5, Insightful)
One of my fondest memories of Win2K was semi-regularly seeing Linux/Unix users on Slashdot give it grudging props. It was unpretentious, did what it was supposed to do and did it with reasonable stability. In my opinion, that's pretty much the basics of what an OS is supposed to be, and quite a few other computer users agreed.
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you're saying is that you'd prefer an OS which turns off protection on n00bs by default, rather than allowing those who know what they're doing to configure more access appropriately?
How come that logic is incorrect when it comes to file-security and/or login-security, but when it comes to configuration-level security, all of a sudden we about-face?
I was raised to believe that you default to the more restrictive, so one has to take explicit actions to "open up" functionality which can potentially bite one in the ass. I recall MS being slammed time after time for not doing this in other areas.
You'd have me believe Win2K is preferable because its the last MS OS that didn't start taking this path any way seriously????
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, I wish I had h4x0r parents like that. Mine just told me to brush my teeth, and get three square meals a day.
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, but for anyone not using grep for Windows or Google/MSN Desktop Search, there is a Tweak UI [microsoft.com] setting that switches XP's search back to look _exactly_ like Win2k's search.
(TweakUI's a good download to have around anyway.)
Not only that (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not only that (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not only that (Score:3, Interesting)
Remote Desktop (Score:2)
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:3, Insightful)
The network is sitting behind a NAT router. Email is Thunderbird (or maybe Notes), browser is Firefox or other non-IE browser.
In such a situation Win2K is good for many years to come.
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:3, Interesting)
My company used to have the attitude that their well firewalled network + NAT was nice and secure. And it was, until someone plugged an infected laptop into the network (I think it was blaster, could be wrong).
Thankfully my 2k box was uptodate with patches. However the network became unusable for at least a day.
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:2, Funny)
Right. Thunderbird only does the half that doesn't involve spreading viruses.
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:2)
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:2, Insightful)
But maybe not (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the "popularity" of Windows 2000 is a factor. I think its more of businesses have a hard time justifying that hit for another $199 to Microsoft for an updated version when the version they've already paid for meets their needs.
Re:But maybe not (Score:2, Insightful)
Other issues to consider are things like Microsoft Java VM support. We have a few applications that require MS JVM (yes, I know it sucks and it probably very insecure), and getting it
Re:But maybe not (Score:5, Insightful)
What kills it is the litterally millions of dollars in man hours that it takes to certify all of your applications prior to rollout, new scripting for things that didn't work, deployment teams to actually do the work, lost productivity when the upgrade doesn't go as expected for every single user. The list goes on and on. For a company like the one I worked at recently (100K employees), that $199 is just a drop in the bucket of the total upgrade cost.
And for what? For 50-75% of average business users, they're doing email, documents and presentations. Linux/OO could easily do that for them. So where is the compelling reason to upgrade to XP or Longhorn other than the monopolist dropping support for your current OS?
Re:But maybe not (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, XP does have one additional goodie.... I know of a couple companies that would rather not bother with product activation.
The best story I know of personally is with a notebook demanding reactivation for hardware changes during an XP trial while the user was on the road in a remote location with no way to activate... to bad it was the CEO's notebook. I guess these companies pushing product activation just can not understand why some customers resent being treated as copyright infringers.
Activation by phone (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not quite sure what the limitations are, but Microsoft obviously has measures in place to limit the number of times someone can re-activate XP that way. I've had customers who radically changed and upgraded their PCs a number of times over the last few years. When they had a drive crash and no good backups, it was up to me to swap out their drive and re-install XP and their apps from scratch. Their key refused to activate again, because apparently, MS decided it had been re-activated too often already and they put some kind of "block" on the code.
Re:But maybe not (Score:3, Interesting)
The same is true of most shops that run Unix. Or any major software such as Oracle for
Re:But maybe not (Score:3, Interesting)
If it ain't broke... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think this is unique to Windows, though. How many shops are still on older versions of Solaris, Red Hat, or Suse? Heck, even Steve Jobs can't understand why people on OS X 10.2 and previous have not upgraded yet. Unless you *have* to have the latest and greatest -- or are running some s
maybe this is good for linux... (Score:2)
the other place where ms has this problem is vb6/vs6. ms wants to move developers from a (largely) ms only developement platform to something bigger/better. so now the develo
Good enough wins. (Score:5, Interesting)
win2k (Score:2)
2000??? (Score:2)
Re:2000??? (Score:2)
--trb
Why Change? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why? (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Why would they? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cost dictates buisnesses (Score:2, Interesting)
The initial model of growth probably was that as buisnesses purchase and add NEW hardware, they will obivously prefer latest software. Now that PC penertration has into businesses has almost saturated, thi
Speaking of XP... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Speaking of XP... (Score:2, Informative)
You might find it useful. Scroll down to the end for XP. The dates are 2006 for end of Mainstream support and 2011 for Extended.
Two things (Score:5, Informative)
1. There isn't very much difference between XP and 2000. 2000 is a fairly stable platform that runs pretty much all the same software as XP. "If it ain't broke"
2. The activation stuff sucks. Even as a legal owner I find it is a huge pain in the ass. This is especially true when you upgrade a server. It's not uncommon to upgrade servers either by changing/adding hardware or just replacing the whole machine which can cause you to have to reactivate Windows. Now, it's not that hard to reactivate but it's just a stupid little thing you have to do and the machine won't work until it's done. It feels risky to upgrade machines running XP because you're not sure if everything will go smoothly because of the activation crap.
I use 2000 on my main development machine because sometimes I do have to change the hardware for testing purposes and I got tired of having to continuously reactivate Windows.
I don't know what I'm going to do if they stop supporting 2000. More reason to spend more time in Linux or OS X I guess (although technically I simply must spend some time in Windows for development purposes).
Re:Two things (Score:2)
In my experience, XP doesn't survive a complete-machine-swap very well anyway - it's safest to do a clean re-install. Even changing the motherboard can kill it - I guess it's got chipset-specific drivers configured with no fallback to generic drivers. In that case, if you have to reinstall anyway, reactivation isn't that big of a deal.
Re:Two things (Score:2)
How ironic... (Score:2)
So, basically, Microsoft can't win here. No matter what they do, people will complain. Forced upgrade or forced stagnation.
Good thing I use Linux and my upgrades are free.
Re:How ironic... (Score:3, Insightful)
If MS doesn't want customers complaining (not sure this is true, but...), they need but support useful products for as long as customers are willing to pay for them.
Nevertheless... (Score:2)
Soft Sell Upgrade (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a lot of work for Microsoft programmers and designers to pull off and a lot of expense. But most of this work needs to be done anyway and in the long term it can only pay off for the company and for its customers. Longhorn is going to take a while to get here, so they might as well make it worth the effort.
What new features? (Score:4, Interesting)
For the life of me, I can't figure out why anybody would consider moving thousands of workstations to XP. The only thing I can come up with is the built in firewall which can be controlled via group policy.
User interface improvements? Big deal, so now it looks like nintendo. Better help? Users call the help desk. 64 bit? Big deal...
-Intelligent User Interface
-Comprehensive Digital Media Support
-Greater Application and Device Compatibility
-Enhanced File and Print Services
-Improved Networking and Communications
-Integrated Help and Support Services
-Improved Mobile Computing
-Reliability Improvements
-Stronger Security Protections
-Easier Manageability
-64-Bit Support
-Looking Forward: The Microsoft
We keep Win98-SE (Score:3, Interesting)
Duh! (Score:2)
Planned Obsolescence (Score:2)
Computers are appliances. Like cars, refrigerators, and furnaces, computers don't change their function (at least in a typical business application) throughout their lifetime so why should they be replaced or updated if they ain't broke?
XP offers the same essential platform as Win2K. Would I replace my car to get new chrome? As a consumer I might, but as a business owner, I don't thin
Care for the careful.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The enterprise costs of XP in support are greater than 2000 in a number of cases. Many companies bought into 2000 in the very beginning, and got hardware that worked at that time. Resources are a problem for many of the machines built OEM for Win2k. Additionally, compatibility issues with other software and hardware solutions arise. Speaking from personal experience, our company committed to a software phone system which, as it turned out when we tried to upgrade to XP, just STOPPED WORKING. This is really bad for a CALL CENTER. Compatibility issues such as these mar XP's widespread corporate adoption.
I will go so far as to predict Longhorn will have the same adoption problem if Redmond continues current patterns. With WinFS and
It can happen (Score:2)
Old Macs hang around, too (Score:3, Informative)
Are you kidding? (Score:4, Informative)
And this is surprise because... (Score:2)
It is actually always have been a problem - IT industry wants customers to move on, but customers want the opposite - stick with things wich works and don't mess with that. Yeah, there always are improvements which can be
Windows 2000 at work (Score:2, Insightful)
XP does not give any increase in productivity and therefore there is no need to upgrade. Also at the rate Microsoft releases new operating systems the workload on the integration teams increase. Rolling out a new operating system requires a lot of testing on all the hardware found in the corporation.
Have you tried upgrading? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your system is down for a minimum of several days, and possibly weeks as all the apps have to be reinstalled/upgraded/reconfigured. It may not work at all.
If the system is WORKING then only a fool would bugger about with it. I have no intention of upgrading any of my WIn2K servers until such time as they are down for other reasons. And even then, only if I am sure that all the third party apps are guaranteed to work - most of our mission critical stuff is ONLY certified for WIn2k server edition. Mission-critical means if its down, we stop earning money. So down is not very good news.
Still using Win95 (Score:3, Interesting)
Little problems in XP not in 2k (Score:4, Interesting)
1. MSN Messenger auto running. Sure in a corp environment you can just have it disabled but it's annoying for small businesses that just don't have the IT resources to do it.
2. OS popups. Notifications above the tray that bring you the most inane messages ever. Try plugging in a USB2 device into a system that only has USB1.1 and follow the popup's instructions. Who the hell thought this was a good idea? I'm sure this is from MS's "usability" group that brought us Clippy and Search Mutt.
3. Window pane focus changes. This one I just don't understand. In 2k, if I open Windows Explorer in folder view, I can use the scroll wheel to scroll the pane that the mouse is over. In XP, I have to click the pane first to scroll. This probably doesn't affect many people but for those that it does, it is super annoying.
Since 2k still works for most people, I can see why XP would have such a problem replacing it.
The upgrade treadmill (Score:3, Insightful)
Following the house analogy a little further, Microsoft has turned the house into, "Here's the house + basic plumbing fixtures + basic appliances." Actually, that's not too far from the way a house is bought, EXCEPT...
1: They've defined the whole package. When you buy a new house, you usually get to spec out fixtures and basic appliances.
2: They want you to re-purchase the whole thing every 3 years. Usually I only re-purchase as things wear out, and repair as needed.
3: They tend to bundle more appliances in with new releases. I'd never expect the toaster, food processor, and TV to be part of my "house" purchase.
Now compare the house model to Gentoo Linux. Gentoo has releases, but for the most part you can ignore them. At the lowest maintenance level, you just run "glsa-check" and keep up with security fixes. Higher maintenance levels are available if you want to stay closer to the bleeding edge, but at no point are you forced or expected to chuck it all and reinstall the OS. Some updates can be painful, like the new baselayout last week on my server. (The desktops took it just fine.) But it was still better than a reinstall.
OTOH, to be able to turn PVC piping and Romex into something people will line up for at midnight to buy is an interesting marketing feat, in itself.
Past Behavior (Score:3, Insightful)
I know there are certainly still county and state government offices around where I live still using ME simply because nobody will budget OS upgrades.
The workers are NOT pleased.
That's what MS gets for preannouncing Longhorn... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to justify upgrading your stable W2K server to XP if a successor product is just around the corner. Longhorn has been "just around the corner" for years.
It's common practice for software vendors to preannounce product in order to keep customers from looking elsewhere. But sometimes the tactic can backfire.
Here's a thought... (Score:3, Interesting)
While they'll bitch and moan, you'll have tons of programmers on the side who'd be chomping at the bit to supply support for legacy systems/OSes.
Hell, I imagine that for the most part, you have the potential to rebuild a good deal of the computer industry, just by fixing holes in old MS products, etc, that MS in turn would save a fortune in no longer having to support.
Its Microsoft NOT knowing their customers. (Score:4, Interesting)
While it may be fine for a Microsoft customer (Don't laugh. So its like a Mafia customer. They make them an offer...) like Dell to sell all the machines with XP pre-installed we (a Dell customer to the tune of several 10K units per year) just strip that puppy off the machine and install a plain vanilla Win2k from a CD because its absolute murder on the software when something changes.
If the OS changes and breaks something in our software, its a lot tougher and more expensive for us to fix (when its even possible. We probably won't be able to rehire the same team and most of the, uh, interesting documentation was done by osmosis.)
Microsoft's XP can sit on the shelf 'till the Longhorn cows come home.
Win2K is curently fine. We wouldn't even have gotten off NT4.0 if they hadn't 'end-of-life'd it. It did what was required and stayed out of the way.
If that hurts Microsoft's pocket book, maybe they should get into the toy business.
Reminders for January 2010 (Score:5, Funny)
Windows 2000 is pretty solid. (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact that usage has only dropped by 4% shows that their customers still want to use it. I would think they would do a better job of doing what their clients want.
This seems like a bad move.
Not Surprising... (Score:3, Insightful)
Before anti-MS zealots get too excited (Score:3, Insightful)
The other fact that this story reveals is that many MS customers are so happy with Win 2K that they don't want to change. That inertia is far more damaging to the prospect of Linux on the desktop than it is to MS's bottom line.
I've not upgraded and my breaking point is near... (Score:3, Informative)
Even just to install the later version(s) of Media Player, you have to agree to some awful license that lets it sniff out your machine and make its own determination (without asking for my input) about whether I'm in violation of their license policies.
And now they have other tools that are starting to do this as well.
And XP is full of "more of same", which is why I have resisted upgrading.
Why should I, a customer who believes he IS in compliance, fear these tools except because I don't trust Microsoft to implement them well and flexibly enough to do anything but screw me? Every time they are wrong, Microsoft gets another sale (or tries to) and I get no recourse. They can deny me bug fixes, upgrades, and so on based solely on their program's opinion of my license management practices.
This problem has to be worse at sites where installation is so complicated that machines are ghosted. Presumably in the ghosting case, you buy a heap of licenses, but then you copy a single image to all the different machines. Well, that's all well and good, but when you get all done, you're all apparently violators.
There's just a limit to what you can mechanically detect. And when you've got as much income as Microsoft plainly has, you need to learn to trust that most people must be paying you and not start to piss them off by treating them like they are cheaters.
They should be investing in tools that allow them to flexibly manage a sense of how many licenses you have at a site, and that don't make me dig around in my basement every time I need to do an upgrade and it wants me to find the original disk from which I installed something to prove I'm a real person. I've given them far too much real money and have been too staunch a supporter of software-for-fee to be treated this way.
Trying to force me into upgrading to a product that treats me worse by cutting support for one that does not is no way to engender my customer loyalty. Maybe if Microsoft doesn't care, it's time to start complaining to the various tools that I (again) BUY on Microsoft's platform and tell them I'm going to be jumping ship from Microsoft and that means I won't be buying their tools any more unless they run on Linux or Apple or wherever I end up. If Microsoft doesn't hear my little voice, maybe it will hear the voices of the tools that I want that are the only reason I buy from Microsoft. Maybe if I could buy Adobe InDesign or Adobe Photoshop for Linux (please don't tell me Gimp is good enough, because it's just not), I wouldn't have to buy Microsoft at all.
Use every other version of Windows (Score:3, Informative)
Re:...Or It Could Be... (Score:2, Insightful)
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. (Score:2)
There is definitely a need to move from NT4 to 2000 - the differences are sizeable - similar to those seen between NT3.5 and 4 - from 2000 to XP, however - there is little reason to move, from a business perspective. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. We've moved most of our servers to 2003, due to better NLB support, but those that don't need to move, don't.
Re:we still use windows 95 (Score:2)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)
They already do [microsoft.com].
Re:Well... (Score:2)
next decade? (Score:2)
there is a possibility that longhorn is their last chance to change their model. i've wondered if that hasn't contributed to the delays.
eric
It's not that easy... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a very expensive and time consuming process to update the system for businesses because they have to test and probably update lots of other programs as well as the system. Some of the programs you don't find in the consumer market and there is no guarantee that the vendor has an updated version that works with the latest system. If the business is using programs in that category, then they have to either wait on the vendor to create an update or they have to switch to another program. Switching programs can create even more problems. All in all, upgrading the system when there is no real reason to do so just isn't done. Forget Windows 2000, I know of businesses still running DOS for some of their programs simply because the function the program provides still works just fine.
Bottom line, the goal of the last few Windows upgrades has been more to generate hardware sales for PC vendors and cash flow for Microsoft than it has been to introduce real innovation and savvy businesses recognise that. Longhorn doesn't look to be any more than an enhanced DRM platform that will require faster hardware at this point and that is not likely to make it a compelling upgrade for the average business (nor for an informed consumer). Microsoft is stuck in a rut, in the sense that it looks like Longhorn will be "more of the same" from Microsoft, and that just won't cut it anymore.
Re:My company. (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming you're under fifty employees, have you looked at MS's Small Business Server? For about the price of the server OS on its own you get all the big server products provided you run them all on the same box.
Granted, there's not a lot to make SBS 2003 a must-have over SBS 2000 apart from:
1. Exchange 2003's Outlook Web Access is much nicer than 2000's
2. ISA Server 2004 instead of ISA 2000 (if you get the SBS 2003 Premium edition and apply SP1)
and they're just nice-to-haves really, along with all the other Server 2003 nice-to-haves.
Re:More Upgrading = More Hassle.... (Score:2)
Clearly Adobe are stupid then! Certain Adobe apps don't support Windows 2000. For example, I know Premiere Pro and Encore DVD require XP because I was caught out by this. I can't understand why this is the case, but there must be some over-riding technical reason for it, because otherwise it is just marketing suicide.