Since a while, I had the fuzzy impression that Microsoft Vista was a failure. It brings nothing really new, wants you to buy new hardware, and has lost the momentum – if it ever had one. Corporations hate Vista, and are keeping XP running as long as possible. Some folks get Vista on their newly purchased PCs, but with the slowing-down economic landscape, this pump is only pumping wet air, not water.
Now considering the business model of Microsoft, you have to recognize they have only 2 cashcows : their OS (aka Operating System aka Windows XP aka Vista) and Office (Word, Excel, and the dreadful Powerpoint). All other attempts to sell stuff were financial disasters (the Xbox, the Zune, etc).
With Vista being a failure, Windows 7 a long shot in the future, people start looking elsewhere, and they like what they see : the Mac is a great desktop, and Linux a great server. And Openoffice does the job for 95% of the people.
So what is left for Microsoft ? Not much. They are getting irrelevant quickly, possibly more than IBM when people stopped buying their mainframes. Maybe a good Office for Linux would keep them afloat for a while, but it might already be too late : politicians have understood the problem of data archiving associated with proprietary formats. So long, Microsoft, and good riddance !
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