Microsoft has really been spinning it’s wheels for the last six or seven years. With the exception of improving security, nearly everything it has done since Windows 2000 has been focused on sizzle rather than steak. The same operating system with prettier pictures. You can see it in the whole user interface, and you can see it even more clearly in the API, because they’ve been making ever-more-minor modifications to it.

Oh, the number of modifications has been increasing, and dramatically. They’ve even replaced the entire Win32 API now, or so they’d have you believe, with the .NET stuff. But the actual effect that each modification has had has been increasing small. Reading about all of the designs they went through for Windows Vista gives the definite impression that there’s no guiding vision for the OS anymore, that Microsoft knows the cash cow is terminally ill and is trying desperately to milk it for everything it can get before it dies.

On the other hand, Linux has been catching up very quickly, on many fronts. And on several of them, it has surpassed Windows already. For instance, the tickless kernel (a new power-saving feature), and the Beryl project (advanced graphics for the Linux OS that make the Aero interface look cheap).

If you’ve been following my OS Wars posts, you might think that this is the zealotry of the recently converted. And there’s probably some truth to that, but not a great deal; I’ve been thinking this about Microsoft since Windows XP was still in beta. I just didn’t realize there was a viable alternative, since I hadn’t paid much attention to Linux until recently (not realizing that it was improving as rapidly as it was).

Microsoft has a lot of money socked away. Even if they never sold another copy of Windows or Office (their only real money-makers), they wouldn’t go out of business for years. But could they use that time to make a relevant product again?

If things continue as they are, we may just find out.