In a presentation at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas, analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and not responded to the market and faces serious competition that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts.

My question is “what serious competition?” Linux, MAC and other OSes have been around, viable and available for some time, yet none have really chipped away at Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop. What’s more, by all accounts, the Windows Server Market is expanding, not contracting!

It seems that Microsoft’s only real competition is itself, users choosing to stick with XP, instead of Vista, network administrators sticking with Windows Server 2003 (or even 2000), and not even entertaining thoughts of switching to Windows Server 2008. The list goes on for many of Microsoft’s products, ranging from MS Office to Small Business Server, people just seem to stick with what works for them, and that may be the real problem here. Let me put it this way, Microsoft’s biggest enemy is common sense! Common sense basically dictates if something works, leave it alone.

Even so, alternatives to Microsoft’s products are still not being considered as viable by most of the mainstream market. Does anyone know why? After all, we can’t chalk it up to quality, especially if you listen to how much people complain about Microsoft’s products and it can’t be a cost issue, Linux for the most part is free and it can’t be because of a lack of applications, there are open source alternatives that with a little bit of work could probably meet anyone’s needs.

Yet we hear very little news of any enterprises, small businesses, non profits (and pretty much any business segment) ditching Microsoft’s products and jumping on the band wagon of alternatives! So it seems that applying Silver and MacDonalds arguments to the market will really have no effect, even though their arguments make a lot of sense (even common sense). It’s going to take a lot more than predictions of gloom and doom to derail the Microsoft juggernaut, but I’ll be dammed if I know what it is! Do you? If so, let me know!