Or more specifically one man, William Henry Gates III. Ok, so taking pot shots at Bill Gates is pretty much like shooting fish in a barrel these days but there is a reason for this. Microsoft continually churn out sub-standard, buggy software that any other company would call Beta, and have the cojones to actually charge for it. The forementioned software is also usually so full of security holes that if you even think about looking at a link someone's emailed you then your computer will be compromised and have been integrated into a botnet before you can say 'why are virus checkers so damned useless". The sheer amount of spam and zombie networks in existence today is mainly down to Microsoft security flaws, Vista was supposed to change all this and has failed miserably. Primarily because it is such a horrible OS that nobody wants to use due to its' OTT system requirements and confusing number of releases (do you want Pauper, Duke, Emperor or Deity version?). It's no wonder companies like Dell will still supply XP with most of their PC's.
Ah yes, XP an out of date hack of an OS that took 2 major updates to make it in the least bit useable and which is about to get a third to turn it into 'Vista Lite'. Before that we had Windows '95 which was a pretty shell for DOS, Windows '98, a slightly updated '95 and ME (Millenium Edition), which nothing actually ran on. Adding to this, Internet Explorer which seems to actively encourgae users to contract viruses and you have a pretty nasty mess of software.
There is of course a reason behind Micro$ofts popularity, workplaces. IT staff love Windows because of its' inherent buginess. If you swapped an office's computers for Macs or Linux machines running Ubuntu then because of their usability and stability, you could have one person administering them and do away with the rest of the support staff. Of course these guys don't want to be out of a job so they'll churn out the usual ill-informed and anacronistic waffle about 'compatibility' and 'software support'. I have to suffer the usual daily crashes and restarts with XP and it certainly increases my enjoyment of using Leopard and Linux at home.
The Bill Gates gravy train rumbles on, but Microsoft are loosing market share and one of the main players behind this is Google. Gates and crew didn't predict the massive appeal of the internet and were caught on the hop and Google have capitalized on this. Google docs have the potential to damage Office severely and Microsoft buying Yahoo will not make a shred of difference to the search engine war. That fight has finished and nothing can change this. Google won.
Unfortunately Microsoft will not just dissapear overnight but their popularity will continue to be eroded. As a company they are past it and are now playing catchup with just about every other software house in existance, indeed so derivative has Windows been of many of the other major OS's, that even the generally blinkered public are starting to wake up to this and are voting with their feet. Windows 7, the succesor to Vista, will be out as soon as MS can cobble together something remotely functional and again we can expect the usual 'new' (i.e. stolen, copied and rehased) features, but it won't make a difference, it's too little too late and after the Vista fiasco the public are going to be more then a little wary about any new OS release.
RIP Microsoft, may your passing be as quick as possible.
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