Gartner predicts the collapse of Windows

Slashdot is reporting that Gartner has predicted the collapse of Microsoft Windows. It is quite an interesting article.

It talks about the monolithic nature of windows and the bloat of Vista when the requirement is for virtualisation and modularity in order to support differing workloads and platforms. One size does not fit all. In fact it concludes that if Windows 7 follows the current path then Windows will collapse. Being Slashdot many of the MS haters were happy to predict the rise of OSX and Ubuntu as Windows dies and as ever they are way premature. Neither Microsoft or Windows are going anywhere any time soon.

I have been running Vista for about 4 months on my home machine and I have been enormously disappointed. Of course there are some nice features (the Windows Photo Gallery is a great improvement and I love the DVD creator) but the performance when running on a super fast Quad core machine with 3 gigs of memory is nowhere near what I was getting from my previous single core AMD box with just one gig that was running XP. I am also getting up to 3 BSOD crashes per day with analysis of the dump files showing no clear pattern. That is aside from the hangs and the lock ups. But I have stuck with Vista in the hope that SP1 will resolve many of the reliability and performance problems when it hits Windows Update later this month.

If that little rant sounded bad - that isn't my biggest problem with Vista. What winds me up the most is that in it's flurry of new features and pretty new UI it hasn't actually made my life any better. In fact many of the things I do day in day out now take many more steps that they did on previous versions. I find the nannying UAC throws undesired prompts at some really basic operations and the redesigned file explorer slows down navigation unless you are using the prescribed Vista directories (Pictures, Documents, Video etc). Unfortunately some of us need a bit more granularity that that. In short it appears that Microsoft has done its own thing without seeking or responding to feedback from their customers.

But I don't think Service Pack 1 is going to be able to do much about that.

One comment on the Slashdot thread that I particularly liked was from Johannesg who writes; "And one day, someone will ask "what operating system are you running that on?", and despite being a card-carrying geek with a 4-digit slashdot ID, you will be forced to admit "Uhm, I'm not actually sure." Because it won't matter anymore."