And as this year goes by, the situation will quite possibly get worse, because this is going to be a challenging year for PC support and IT staff. The problem seems to be that there is such an acute shortage of experienced or expert technical staff. There is, as one large corporate IT boss told me, "no substitute for experience," and experience takes time. This year, with the release of Windows 2000, there is a whole new ball-game to learn, and almost nobody to get experience from. I honestly believe that Windows 2000 is Microsoft's best operating system ever. I've had my five cents on things that Microsoft has, blatantly, got wrong about it. I think its strategy for promoting the Active Directory is baffling, if not plain stupid, but the basic workstation installation simply eats anything that came before it -- including any version of OS/2 and several flavours of Unix. Microsoft doesn't see this as a problem. Find out what approach it will take by clicking to go to the next page...