That call is starting to ring a little hollow. There's a significant backlash against Vista, and Dell is going to offer XP after June 30th, the official death date for XP.
Microsoft said this week that Windows revenues during the first three months of 2008 were down nearly 24% from the same period last year. One analyst argued that the decline is more evidence that the company is having trouble convincing users of Windows Vista's value.
"More than a year has passed since the rollout of Vista to both the business and consumer markets, and experiencing revenue declines so early in the product lifecycle is not a positive sign," said Allan Krans, an analyst with Technology Business Research.
MS is having problems, and they're getting close to being the IBM of the new millenium (acting like a monopoly in a free market.)
I use best of breed for my clients and Apple is the only one that comes close to being a Microsoft alternative for business users. Linux is a piece of trash in the client arena, while being very usable on the server side. Apple is pathetic on the server side, while being usable on the client side.
Apple will keep gaining market share for the foreseeable future, but they have a LONG way to go to overtake Microsoft. Office environments will be perfectly happy running XP for the next five years if they need to. XP is an extremely stable platform and serves all of the business needs of a high percentage of clients. Plus the development tools for the Microsoft product dwarf the tools used by other OS's.