Adoption implies some sort of willingness on the part of business.

It is disingenuous to call accepting the inevitable "adoption." The prisoners have "adopted" a new diet because the prison has changed what it feeds them, not because they made an active choice.

Business is getting ready for the inevitable caused by Microsoft using their sector dominance and end-of-life policies (known in some circles as "planned obsolescence") to eliminate the choice--they are not in any way rushing to adopt Vista because it represents an improvement over XP.

If you have to replace 1,000 fully functional computers just because Microsoft ends support for the OS there is no celebration in the board room over the "coolness" of the new interface.

In my consulting practice I work with medium sized business startups, and the number one question I get asked is: How can I do this without Microsoft?

Business is fed up.

People want productivity. When you significantly change the interface that workers are used to it costs businesses money. When you change both the OS interface and the office suite interface it compounds the productivity loss.

And when you start looking at 1,000 computers it seems foolish to pay $500,000 to Microsoft for the privilege of learning new interfaces. If you are going to learn new interfaces you might as well save the $500,000 and go with open source.

Office 2007 was a horrible blunder on Microsoft's part. Changing the interface and attempting to force feed quasi-XML document formats to the world's largest established user base was a serious misstep.

I teach college and what I hear all the time now is, "I got Office 2007. I don't know where anything is. Nobody I know can read my documents." It isn't much of a product endorsement and is driving the adoption of Open Office.

As Microsoft should know, the office suite is the thin edge of the wedge. Five years ago when college students asked about Linux it was usually because they had heard about it--now they ask because it is the operating system on their home computers.

Vista is beginning to have a reputation as the "old" style operating system--if you are cool you run Ubuntu. My students think I am stodgy because I still use Red Hat or Fedora for my Linux platforms.

The world is moving on. The Internet has moved on. If Microsoft keeps producing new interfaces for the same old buggy infrastructure they will eventually be pushed from the desktop in the way they have been pushed from the server side of the Internet.

The corporate world is starting to wake up to the "value" provided by Microsoft, and it is going to be a rude awakening for Microsoft's bottom line when they realize that they have been doing too little, too late under the hood, and too much, too soon at the user interface.

It is difficult to compete with free. And while corporations may be slow, lazy, conformist, and a bit brain dead, they are above all other things cheap. A tipping point will come, and if Microsoft doesn't improve the performance, scalability, and cost of their product line they will fall very hard indeed.