Now wait just a darn minute, here-- something stinks in Redmond, and it ain't Love Plumbing and Remodel's consumer report on low-flow toilets. Microsoft announces that they've completed Windows 2000 and suddenly the company's stock shoots through the roof-- it's up 16 points or so since the news first broke. (Evidently, after so many delays, investors were shocked and amazed that the project actually got finished.) That's all well and good for Captain Bill, whose pockets get even bulgier with each successive MSFT improvement. In the meantime, Apple's stock has been floundering for the past week, losing about 20 points off its all-time high of 118; at least some of that might have to do with Windows 2000's little press party. It's clear that the very act of finishing Windows 2000 is a real boost for the Redmond Giant, especially given all of the positive press this occasion is receiving-- and that's where we've got a little problem.

For instance, in yesterday's episode we noted that the high-traffic Barnes & Noble online store was being served by systems running a beta version of Windows 2000-- a testament to that operating system's stability and scalability. We got that info from a Wall Street Journal article we cited, and we simply assumed it was true; why would the Wall Street Journal lie? We quote: "Barnesandnoble.com, a joint venture of Barnes & Noble Inc. and Bertelsmann AG of Germany, is running its entire Web-based bookselling operation on a prerelease version of Windows 2000 with no problems, said Gary King, Barnesandnoble.com's chief information officer."

Except that eagle-eyed faithful viewer Russell Swan decided to check for himself, so he had Netcraft report what server software Barnesandnoble.com was running. What do you know? "www.barnesandnoble.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98." And it's not just the home page; shop.barnesandnoble.com says the same thing. At first we just figured that maybe beta versions of Windows 2000 simply showed up as NT4, but then we decided to check shop.microsoft.com: "shop.microsoft.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows NT5 beta." So we have to wonder-- what's up with Barnesandnoble.com's bogus claims? What are they getting from Microsoft in return for lying to the press-- free tech support when Windows 2000 misbehaves (when they actually start using it)?