Windows is Collapsing?

Really? Well two Gartner analysts think that it is. The codebase is too vast and unwieldy. It will not run on small systems. Customers are reluctant to upgrade to Vista. Three or four years ago, this would have seemed like really important news. Now it looks somewhat unsurprising. Exact Editions is a young business (three years) and only typical in the way that canaries are typical in coal mines, but as it happens we scarcely use Windows in our operation.

Our accounts are run through Excel. We word process contracts in Word (but we hanker after a 'click through' alternative). MS Office running on the Mac may be more important to us than Windows. But all the crucial day-to-day software running our platform is web-based (email and web-accessed internal processes). The operating systems that matter to us are Linux first, Mac second, and Windows nearly 'nowhere' -- just ahead of Symbian, which is running our Nokia phones. But all these operating systems are just 'tools'. What overwhelmingly matters to us as we look forward, is the web, and the emergent cloud computer that we all use. Maybe the concept of a monopolistic global operating system has had its day?