Is Vista the Last Version of Desktop Windows?
Last fall, Gartner Research dramatically predicted that Vista would be the last version of Microsoft Windows. Yes, these are the same people who reported that Apple's iTunes sales were plummeting, only to recant a few days later. And yes, Steve Ballmer has flatly denied Gartner's claim about Vista.
Still, there's reason to take Gartner's underlying point seriously: With Microsoft now running five years between major releases, Gartner is probably right that the current Windows architecture is unsustainably complex. The future of Windows, Gartner believes, is a modularized operating system sold at least in part through a subscription model and enabled by virtualization at the core.
Microsoft says Gartner has it wrong, but the company is clearly embracing all the elements of Gartner's vision: virtualization, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and even hints of modularization in the structure of Vista.
Microsoft initially viewed the SaaS trend as a threat to its application software business but is now exploring how to embrace the movement for its own benefit. Jeff Raikes cautions that Microsoft doesn't hear of a lot of people who want to run Word over the Internet, but says that collaborative infrastructure software lends itself to this model much more. The BBC saw Microsoft's push into online software services via Office Live as one of the big stories of 2006.
It's conventional wisdom today that some software functionality is better delivered in a subscription/service or hosted model, while some software is better run natively. A lot of bets are already down on which functions belong where, and about the only safe prediction about the SaaS model is that both operating systems and applications are going to be deconstructed and reinvented over the next few years.
But the end of desktop OS has been breathlessly predicted at least since 1999 and still shows no sign of happening.
