Windows NT Workstation Licenses Exceed 11 Million

LAS VEGAS, Nov. 17, 1997 — Market momentum for the Microsoft® Windows NT® Workstation operating system continues to build as leading companies including Allstate Insurance Co., Bridgestone Corp., Montgomery Securities Inc. and Prudential Insurance Company of America have embraced Windows NT Workstation as their standard business desktop operating system. Microsoft Corp. announced today at COMDEX/Fall that sales of licenses for Windows NT Workstation have surpassed 11 million units. Also, 70 percent of large and medium-sized companies are considering or are already deploying Windows NT Workstation, and 25 percent of small businesses are running a mixed environment of Windows NT Workstation and the Windows® 95 operating system.

“Customers are asking for the easiest path to move to Windows NT; in purchasing new business PCs, customers should deploy Windows NT Workstation 4.0, our recommended business operating system,” said Jim Allchin, senior vice president, personal and business systems group at Microsoft. “Customers are finding that a combination of powerful yet aggressively priced new hardware platforms, the rapid movement of applications to a 32-bit environment, and their desire to lower their total cost of ownership make Windows NT Workstation the best operating system choice for business.”

Over the past six months PC manufacturers have more than doubled the rate at which they preinstall Windows NT Workstation. PC manufacturers such as Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp., Digital Equipment Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Micron Electronics Inc. and Siemens Nixdorf Information Systems Inc. are preinstalling Windows NT Workstation 4.0 on a significant portion of their PCs for business. These trends demonstrate the growing acceptance of Windows NT Workstation as the operating system of choice for new business PCs.

PC Industry Shows Support for Windows NT Workstation

This week, in the Microsoft Partner Pavilion at COMDEX (Booth LS-2212), 18 PC industry leaders are demonstrating innovative solutions based on Windows NT Workstation, including notebooks, business desktop PCs, Net PCs and high-end workstations. IBM will demonstrate its new laptops optimized for Windows NT Workstation. These give users the performance, reliability and security of Windows NT, even when they leave the office, and allow businesses to deploy Windows NT Workstation homogeneously across their organizations.

“Together with Microsoft, IBM is delivering on its promise to provide customers with the highest-quality, most advanced products for mobile computing,” said Steve Ward, general manager, IBM Mobile Computing. “The ThinkPad 770, being demonstrated in Microsoft’s Partner Pavilion, offers extensions to Windows NT Workstation that deliver the inherent security and reliability of Windows NT, plus full support for power management, UltraBay plug and play, and hot plug PC Cards.”

“Dell is excited by the explosive demand for Windows NT 4.0-based solutions and is committed to helping businesses with this transition,” said Eric Harslem, senior vice president, products and technology at Dell. “Our recent Optiplex product announcements include Windows NT Workstation 4.0 as a standard operating system preinstalled. The combination of Dell’s Managed PC initiative and Windows NT provides our mutual customers the best TCO solution available. We are confident that Windows NT Workstation 4.0 is the best operating system for businesses of all sizes.”

Microsoft is investing heavily to improve device support on Windows NT Workstation-based PCs. The software company continues to work closely with device and peripheral vendors to ensure that Windows NT provides the richest hardware support. Starting next year, all new devices receiving the Designed for Microsoft Windows logo will support Windows NT Workstation. Also, hundreds of leading application vendors are writing rich and compelling
32-bit Windows NT Workstation-ready applications – with more than 100,000 32-bit
Windows-based applications available today.

Laying the Foundation for Windows NT Workstation 5.0

The market momentum for Windows NT establishes an important foundation as business customers look forward to the 5.0 version, which was released to beta testing in September 1997. Deploying Windows NT Workstation 4.0 today on new PCs will provide customers the easiest migration path to Windows NT Workstation 5.0 when it is available. As the premier desktop operating system for businesses of all sizes, Windows NT Workstation 5.0 will build on the strengths of Windows NT Workstation 4.0, offering the lowest TCO of any Windows-based desktop, and provide a “superset” of Windows 98 functionality.

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