People have been predicting Microsoft's demise for 15 years, and it hasn't happened, and I'd even argue that Microsoft have got better in that time: IIS has gon

People have been predicting Microsoft's demise for 15 years, and it hasn't happened, and I'd even argue that Microsoft have got better in that time: IIS has gone from being a joke to being a worthy Apache competitor, .NET is a great technology and should be seen as a huge step forward, the security and stability in their OSes have improved with each release (despite taking some flack for 'overprotective' security measures for it in Vista), and they have been making many positive usability improvements (e.g. Office 2007 and the Vista Start Menu), DirectX has taken the crown from OpenGL for consumers and managed to avoid standards hell, Visual Studio is extremely well regarded, they got rid of their worst products despite it being controversial (e.g. Visual Basic and Frontpage), and SQL Server still blows away MySQL in most regards. If Windows 7 is the last major operating system, then what will replace it? Mac OS X? Apple's cheapest desktop computer is £499 excluding monitor. Good luck selling them to the business users who traditionally buy Dells at half the price, especially as most are using Office and Exchange Server, plus all the custom software in their niche which is written for Windows. Linux distributions? They're getting better, but the community is still incredibly fractured and the infrastructure with commercial software is still far from ideal. Dropping Adobe's products or Office for their open-source equivalents just isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future. Perhaps when Wine reaches parity with Windows (and I can see that time coming), but even if that particular hurdle is overcome, from a usability perspective it's going to take a big effort for GNOME to reach parity with Windows, let alone manage to make enough commercial impact to overcome the familiarity that the average Windows user has. Hell, even in terms of system administration, managing a set of Windows machines is supposed to be much easier than a set of Linux machines. Perhaps the difference is we're going to have a time where people choose Windows instead of having Windows as the only choice, and that's a positive step forward. Oh, and while Microsoft would rather have people paying for Vista licenses, XP licenses still means money in their pocket as well. We're still at a time when they're primarily competing with themselves. If people use Windows 7 for a decade, they're still getting the license fees on basically every PC unit sold.