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Philippines deficit

MANILA: The Philippines posted a 4.307-billion-dollar trade surplus in 1999, swinging from a deficit of 163 million dollars a year earlier, the National Statistics Office said on Wednesday.

Imports climbed 3.6 percent to 30.726 billion dollars from 29.659 billion dollars, while exports grew 18.8 percent to 35.033 billion dollars from 29.496 billion dollars, it said in a statement.ÑAFP

IMF applauds Australian economy

SYDNEY: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Wednesday applauded Australia's success in dealing with the impact of the Asian economic crisis and backed tax reform now in the pipeline. In a report which the Australian government saw as endorsing its economic strategy, the IMF executive board endorsed recent interest rate rises and called for further tariff reduction and labour market reform.ÑAFP

Microsoft to unveil Windows 2000

NEW YORK: The US software behemoth Microsoft is ready to launch its newest creation, Windows 2000, amid great hype and despite doubts among analysts that the product can be a success.

The new operating system, designed with 30 million lines of code, will be officially launched Thursday at a celebrity studded gala in San Francisco featuring the man himself, Bill Gates.

"It's the most important product we have ever released," said Microsoft marketing director, Keith White. "It's the basis of all our products going forward."

Windows 2000 is not an upgrade of the Windows desktop operating system, a market Microsoft dominates. It is, rather, an operating system for the high-priced, high-volume server computers businesses use to run their networks, a market in which Microsoft is a mere bit player.

The company's previous server offering, Windows NT, has a reputation of being unstable and unreliable. That reputation may be hard to overcome because in the growing world of e-commerce, any server failure means lost customers.

"If you make a mistake at the data center, it's equivalent to falling off a building. It can be catastrophic," said Michael Gartenberg, a senior vice president at Gartner Group, a computer consulting firm.

The Gartner Group estimates that half of all companies installing Windows 2000 could have compatibility problems, and that the number would only drop to 25 percent in 2001 an announcement that sent Microsoft stock tumbling Friday.ÑAFP