Windows 2000: A Threat to Internet Diversity and Open Standards?

Microsoft conceived Windows 2000 as the operating system for the Internet. This gave many people pause for thought, what with Microsoft's less-than-sterling reputation regarding cohabitation of competitors' software on their operating system. The Internet is based on open standards and interworking between different systems from different suppliers. If Windows 2000 compromises the Internet's integrity and ubiquity-two of its primary hallmarks-will it really be the best operating system to base your Internet services on? Some of the new additions to Windows 2000 show that, although Microsoft pays lip-service to the Internet's sacred tenets of openness and support for standards, it has actually (and sometimes only subtly) removed or subverted these tenets. The Windows 2000 changes appear to subtly exclude technologies from other vendors and make interworking more difficult.