The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Digital Domain: Will the Next Version of Windows Be Worth the Wait?

It won't be (in the near run). There are few serious improvements that they can make on XP for the short haul. Better file management? People are still getting used to not rebooting the their computer four times a day. The biggest challenge to MS is in the near future, an open source OS is going to go mainstream. Microsoft and Longhorn has got to beat that. When it comes, their will be no going back.

As Firefox has shown, the open source community is robust and can change the paradigms of software. First, governments should be on the cusp of switching over to linux. For what they pay in licenses for MS products, they could get for free (an OS, Web Browser, and an office suite). The biggest problem is changing the mindset of the IT people that have so much "invested" in MS.

There are few good arguments against keeping MS products right now. We just need a couple of hardworking network folks and an admin guy that has the guts to make the call.