Microsoft is in trouble and its flagship Windows operating system is broken, Gartner analysts said at the Emerging Trends conference this week. Analysts Neil MacDonald and Michael Silver offered many reasons why Microsoft may see rougher days ahead.

The analysts said Microsoft’s operating-system development times are too long, especially for the level of innovation the company delivers. They also said Windows releases fail to offer a consistent experience between platforms and create compatibility issues. Other vendors, they said, are innovating circles around Microsoft.

These problems translate to the enterprise in unpredictable releases, high management costs, Windows systems that break other applications and prolong testing and adoption time, and overall limited value. That has to be music to the Linux camp’s ears.

Stats to Prove the Point

Gartner offered some statistics to back up this gloomy view. Growth in PC hardware is limited, with Gartner expecting two to eight percent between 2005 and 2011. Emerging markets are a better story with expected growth of 16 to 24 percent for PC hardware, but price sensitivity dampens the optimism. Linux tends to win in developing nations.

“All these things are in opposition to what we’ve seen with people expanding PC use year after year,” MacDonald said.

A transition toward server-agnostic applications could have a major impact on enterprise computing and on Microsoft’s pain. Gartner said 70 to 80 percent of corporate applications require Windows today. But the firm expects a dramatic shift by 2011, when a new wave of OS-agnostic applications will hit the market — specifically, Internet-based apps.

“Sometime in the middle of the next decade, Windows will be playing a much less important role on the desktop,” MacDonald said.

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