Well, we'll be damned-- they just might make it after all. According to a CNET article, Microsoft is mere days away from shipping what they expect will be the final beta version of Windows 2000. Beta 3, which has been anxiously awaited by nervous Windows NT users everywhere, is reportedly "feature complete" and "tuned to approach performance Microsoft hopes to deliver with the final code." Microsoft's 650,000 (!) testers will receive CD-ROMs of the new version in two to four weeks, making Microsoft's internally-targeted October release date look less unlikely.

Shipping Windows 2000 before, say, 2000 is pretty important to Microsoft, who was originally expected to ship Windows NT 5 a couple of years ago. The current version, NT 4, is apparently still classified as not fully Y2K-compliant, and Microsoft's been saying for a long time that the way to get compliant is to upgrade to NT 5, now known as Windows 2000. Of course, that's wonderful advice (if you ignore the fact that it makes people pay lots of money to fix bugs that shouldn't have been there in the first place) provided that Windows 2000 is actually available before the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve. If beta 3 really turns out to be the final beta, that might come true after all. Of course, it would have been a lot nicer for people to have had a year or so to deploy and test rather than making everyone jump at the last minute, but life ain't perfect.

What kills us is that some PC manufacturers are reportedly going to sell computers pre-loaded with Windows 2000 beta 3. Call us overly cautious, but paying money for a computer running beta application software sounds risky enough; we can't imagine buying a machine running a beta operating system. Heck, from what we can tell, most 1.0 releases of Microsoft software are only beta quality anyway, so we'd be particularly leery of running a beta version of Windows, which seems to us to be tantamount to poking a hungry leopard with a stick after strapping two dead gazelles to one's person. Still, if we understood the purchasing choices of the average computer buyer, we wouldn't be shaking our heads befuddled at all the people buying Wintels instead of Macs.