Microsoft recently released the first beta version of Millennium, its new home consumer operating system.

Touted as the follow up to Windows 98, Millennium is slated for release sometime next year, although at this point, the exact shipping date is anyone's guess.

"We're currently on track to deliver it sometime in the year 2000, but it's still too early to guess at a specific date," says Neil Froggatt, Windows product manager with Microsoft Canada Co. in Mississauga, Ont.

Although the release of a first beta is an announcement worthy of some note, and indicates that a product is well underway on its trip to the market, it doesn't really mean much to people near the bottom of the distribution chain. "Beta 1 is a technical beta," Froggatt explains, "so the only people that really play around with it are those who are writing applications for the operating system, or drivers or devices, so that they can start to build their products and test them in the new environment.

"There isn't really a home consumer having a home consumer experience on the operating system yet."

Froggatt maintains that there will probably be a later beta available to value-added resellers and distributors sometime next spring.

The new operating system will follow close on the heels of Windows 2000, Microsoft's new operating system targeted at businesses. The release of two such similarly named products, coupled with the fact that Windows 2000 sounds like the sequel to Windows 98, has many people confused.

"The primary difference (between Millennium and Windows 2000) is that Windows 2000 is designed and built with business customers in mind. Windows 2000 is being built to be the Microsoft standard operating system for organizations of all sizes, whereas Millennium is the next version of our home consumer operating system," Froggatt explains.

"I don't want to call it the next version of Windows 98 because it won't necessarily be Windows 98-point-something or 99 or whatever, but it will be the next version of the home consumer operating system."

To put it more simply, either operating system's lineage can be traced by looking at its kernel. "Windows 2000 is going to be built on the NT kernel and Windows 98 is on the 9x kernel. Millennium will also be built on the 9x kernel. Somewhere down the road it is our goal to have a future consumer operating system that is built on the NT kernel, but it's not Millennium," says Froggatt. "The main reason we have stayed on the 9x kernel for Millennium is to continue to focus on backwards compatibility."

But even with the plan to migrate the consumer operating system to the more powerful and more stable NT kernel, Microsoft intends to keep its consumer and business operating system markets separate.

"We're going to continue to maintain separate business and consumer operating systems. We will never have a single operating system from Microsoft — well, I shouldn't say never, but it's unlikely," Froggatt says, "because we want to include features that are specific to the business audience in the one product and features that are specific to the home audience in the other."

So what's to be expected from Millennium? Well, Microsoft has stated that it will focus on four key facets of the new operating system. The first is PC simplicity — Microsoft wants to streamline and automate maintenance as well as improve the out-of-the-box experience by making hardware upgrades fast and easy.

The second is digital media and entertainment. Microsoft expects Millennium to make it much easier to produce, play and store various forms of digital media, and to improve PC gaming. The third facet is home networking. Millennium aims to make networking quick and painless as more people acquire multiple home computers.

And the fourth is the online experience. Like Windows 98 before it, Millennium will be designed with a focus on the Internet as an integral part of day-to-day computer use.

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