Are We Looking at the Death of Microsoft Windows?

An article in Computerworld warns that Windows is collapsing. Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald called the situation "untenable" and pointed to a large code base that makes upgrades slow and unwieldy, a low adoption rate of Vista, and the rise of Office 2.0 applications as signs pointing to the possible demise of Windows.

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb has even given us a year for the demise: 2011. According to a prediction he made way back in 2005, this is when Microsoft's empire will begin to crumble in the wake of web-based office applications.

I wouldn't go so far as to say we are just three years away, but I did write about how our future was revealing our past and how operating systems would become irrelevant as we began to use the Internet as our platform of choice.

But I also remember back in the mid-90's when CD-ROMs were just starting to become popular components in computers. At the time, I thought we were one the verge of having our computers merge with our entertainment systems. After all, computers could play music through CDs, monitors were quite capable of showing television, we could tune into radio off the Internet, and soon we'd be getting video from the Internet.

It has been over ten years, and computers still haven't become the staple of our entertainment systems. They are getting closer, but we're not completely there yet. The truth is, these things take time. And, as slow as we have been to ditch our receiver and replace it with a computer, businesses will take even longer.

I do agree with MacManus's date as far as Office 2.0 applications becoming viable alternatives to office suites like Microsoft Office. Web-based applications like Adobe's Buzzword are already pretty good. But businesses tend to move pretty slow, and this move is not just from one type of software to another, but from offline to online.

Heck, in 2000 I was still making tweaks to a Visual Basic 3 application that was a mission critical application for the business I worked at. Even the threat of Y2K didn't get them behind replacing the application. Many businesses tend to work with a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality, which means legacy applications can take a long time to die out.

The key here is whether or not Microsoft wakes up and smells the coffee. They've long realized that the Internet is the operating system of the future -- that's why they pulled no punches trying to win the browser wars. Will they make a move towards a streamlined operating system built mainly for the Internet, or will they continue trying to dazzle with bells and whistles?