A pretty balanced article, but it missed a key concept. Microsoft is, at this point, willing to be just "good enough" on the desktop, because they believe strategically that the next round of battles will not be fought there. Instead the next round of battles will be about what the Internet is really good for.
People talk about how the Internet has "changed everything", and they're right. But they have no idea how much change in still in store. When we have easy ways of writing software that runs in an asynchronous, highly distributed fashion, it will kickstart another round of dramatic change.
Microsoft is focused on that, and I think they are in the lead with their Indigo project. It's to be delivered in the same time frame as Longhorn, and it's where Microsoft is investing their big brains. Apple hasn't even entered that game yet, as far as I know. The only other company that has such efforts even on its radar screen is IBM.
So Apple could have the nicest desktop in the world for a while, but (1) Microsoft will just copy the stuff that works better than Windows, and (2) if they can't tie those Apples into this new wave of distributed systems, that imposes some real limits on who will want them, especially in the business world.
Being "just good enough" is another way of saying it sucks. It's that kind of thinking that brought down the big three auto makers.
> Instead the next round of battles will be about what the Internet is really good for.
And how to search it. LOC...Widener...every library is going to be digitized and online. Who's going to be first with NL search capability?