Analysts Say Vista Will “Collapse,” Yahoo Deal Must Happen
Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald told a conference audience yesterday that Microsoft’s Windows product is collapsing and must make radical changes to its operating system or risk becoming a has-been.
I don’t know about Vista, but Microsoft won’t collapse so much as lose its effective monopoly. Just as Apple’s long-term survival included the necessity of gaining some Windows capability, and learning how to play in a Windows world, so Microsoft will have to open up and cooperate. That’s the future: the OS doesn’t matter as much as the spaces between them; the ability to read each other’s files and the end, or at least the mitigation, of the proprietary parts of each OS that make it a poor citizen. The network’s what matters more than the OS.
That said, I’ve tried Vista and Leopard, and Vista’s the one that seems designed by a committee that hates each other.









