While Microsoft is officially repudiating Steve Ballmer’s ruminations on giving Windows XP a stay of execution, the writing is clearly on the wall for Vista.

Let me say upfront that I think Vista is a perfectly serviceable, visually attractive and reasonably secure operating system.

Anyone out shopping for a new computer with decent hardware should feel comfortable about buying a PC with Vista pre-installed.

But that doesn’t matter.

Vista has been so poorly received, for reasons real and manufactured, that Microsoft simply has no choice but to get its next OS on the market as soon as possible.

If corporate customers aren’t upgrading from XP to Vista, then Microsoft’s fabled incoming river of cash slows to a trickle, and shareholders will not be pleased.

So before Vista mutates into an outright debacle, Microsoft will certainly get its successor on the market by 2010 at the latest.

That allows Vista to retreat from the battlefield with some semblance of honor, while Windows 7 can be billed as the revolutionary OS you’ve been waiting for: sleeker, leaner, faster, re-built from the ground up and unburdened by ancient legacy code.

Windows Vista is nowhere near the technological flop that was Windows Me. But it’s rapidly garnering the same reputation and, with Google breathing down Microsoft’s back, there’s no way Microsoft can afford to let a negative public perception turn into a financial catastrophe.

So bank on Windows 7 by Spring 2010 at the latest.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 1:31 pm and is filed under General News.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.