Gee, the demise of Microsoft. Where have we been hearing that one? Oh, for the past 15 years form the Open Source crowd. So far, we’re not impressed.
I don’t think the article is predicting ‘the demise of MS’ or the ascendancy of Linux. But it does pose an interesting question about the future of software development management styles.
Gee, I don't know that the OSS crowd has been crowing the demise of M$ since 1994. But it has been making steady gains. Personally, I stopped using Windows full time in 03, six years ago. My latest laptop, a T61 Thinkpad came with Vista Business. It's interesting, and aggravating. I installed openSUSE 11.1-x86_64 on it. It installed right away. No fuss no muss. Resized (shrank) the NTFS file system, and created logical volumes for Linux. Everything works (even WiFi). I boot into Vista now and then to play around with it, but that's a hassle since I'm way more comfortable in Linux now. So as soon as I get around to setting it up, I'll have Vista running in VM, and avoid the hassle of the reboots.
M$ should be worried long term. Their business model and pricing structure relies on a robust, expanding economy, with free flowing cash available for their upgrade (soft and hard) cycle. If companies are going to tighten up their spending, then companies will either stick with the systems they have, while continuing to pay the licensing and support costs, or they may start to take a more serious look to OSS and Linux, that can provide everything they need for, oh say, 90~99% of their operations.
Lets see, free OS, free Office, Free web server, free development tools.... that kind of thing is going to look awfully attractive to companies with tightening cash flow.
I'm not saying a transition would be painless and without costs, but the costs may very well be less than new MS licenses across the board for the next "upgrade cycle", especially with a large number of seats.
Oh and before you go down the too hard to retrain staff argument. I had my father running on Linux. He was late 70's at the time, and didn't have even 1/4 the computer experience that most people today have. Granted he mostly used Firefox and e-mail, and occasionally OpenOffice, but once you understand the basic workings of a GUI, learning new menu options isn't all that difficult.