At Gartner's all-singing, all-dancing IT/Expo conference, two analysts pronounced (see coverage in Computerworld) that Microsoft Windows is collapsing under its own weight: bloated, overly complex, and delivering so little new functionality that those...

Windows is "collapsing" and Microsoft Corp. must make radical changes to the way it does business if it wants to remain viable, according to a pair of Gartner analysts.

Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald, analysts at the technology research firm, said on Thursday that Microsoft has not responded to the market and faces serious competition in a number of areas that will make the Windows operating system obsolete unless the company takes significant action.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software behemoth is being dragged down by nearly two decades of legacy code, which has made it impossible for it to quickly design a new version of Windows that has any meaningful improvements. That is primarily why computer users have been so slow to voluntarily adopt Windows Vista, Silver and MacDonald said.

"This is a large part of the reason [why] Windows Vista delivered primarily incremental improvements," they said at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas. "Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile."

Only about six per cent of businesses have adopted Vista, the analysts said in a presentation titled "Windows is Collapsing," with...
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