Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, in an interview at the Comdex/Fall show in Las Vegas, said he looks forward to quieting critics of Windows' scalability. "With Windows 2000, we've listened to what IT people want," says Gates. And what's that? Industry-standard servers that can be connected to function as a single machine, with the performance and reliability of high-end systems such as those from Tandem Computers, Gates says. He admits, however, that it may be as long as 18 months before Microsoft proves that point in real-world IT environments and quiets critics of Windows' scalability.

Wolf Organization Inc., a $300 million building-supplies distributor in Waynesboro, Pa., plans to stick with Windows as it adds servers and database capacity to an SAP system logging 2,000 transactions per second. "As we grow to be a billion-dollar company, we're confident Microsoft is going to stay ahead of the curve to provide scalability and reliability," says Vince Johnson, Wolf's VP of IS.

At Comdex/Fall, Microsoft executives talked about the company's ongoing effort to build support for Extensible Markup Language throughout its products, which they say will let Windows interoperate with mainframe systems and boost the platform's appeal for running E-business apps. Microsoft also hopes to use XML to stitch together E-commerce applications that call services from myriad Web sites. "This is where they get beaten up being an enterprise player," says Beth Gold-Bernstein, a senior analyst at the Hurwitz Group.

Microsoft, Unisys, and EMC demonstrated a mock-up data center comprising 52 Windows 2000 servers supporting 4,000 transactions per second, 3 billion Web hits per day, and a 9 terabyte SQL Server 7 database. "The scenario keeps getting better and better," says Microsoft president Steve Ballmer.

The demo proves that Microsoft and its partners can build high-end computing environments using commercially available products, says Dwight Davis, an analyst at Summit Strategies. "Windows 2000 is shaping up to be a lot more scalable than many people would have guessed," he says. But Davis notes that "the only proof points that have any meaning are production environments that support high-transaction environments and large databases."