Gartner Says Vista Will Collapse. And That’s Why The Yahoo Deal Must Happen

The Gartner guys might have it right, but TechCrunch has it all wrong.  They’ve been drinking a bit too much of that Web 2.0 kool-aid.

The desktop still matters; and the software that currently runs on the web is so far behind the stuff on the desktop, it will be a long time before it becomes a real danger.  They say only 6% of companies have adopted Vista; that is still hundreds of thousands or millions of companies.  The number of companies who have adopted Google Docs is no doubt a small fraction of even that.

Nevertheless, Microsoft is in trouble.  Vista not only did not deliver enough value to be worth the time they spent on it, it is too big and slow for MS to react quickly to the problem.  All they can do is watch the carnage happen in slo-mo.

So what can they do?  How about turning your greatest enemy (open source) into your greatest strength.  The bazaar may work wonders for the OS Kernel, but the cathedral is what you need to build a great user experience.

MS would be far better off adopting an open-source kernel - maybe even one built on some unix variant - and putting their APIs and interfaces on top of it.  That way they can stop wasting their time on the parts of the OS no one cares about and spend it on the parts that make them money.