So the oh so famous Gartner Analysts have announced that Microsoft Windows is collapsing under its own weight and that a radical change is needed.

The conclusion of the blog is correct: ‘How fast will Windows collapse under its weight? It’ll take longer than folks think.’. They are not going to collapse. They have a good user base and in my daily work I get customers insisting on Microsoft products, just because they know these products and their features. Or people knowing people telling them how excellent the choise for Microsoft is.

So, what is the deal here? It is simple. Microsoft is starting to prepare people that Windows 7 will not be compatible with older version. As this might be a shock to a lot of people, Microsoft needs to educate people why it is needed. It will be hard to sell that /all/ existing windows software will simply not run anymore on Windows 7. We could already have read that it won’t be compatible.

And that’s where Gartner kicks in. Nothing better then some ‘independent’ analysts telling that Microsoft is doomed and that there need to be radical changes. In a later stage Microsoft can announce the incompatibility and refer to this Gartner statement. And Gartner can again publish in a few years how Microsoft succesfully avoided the crisis.

So please read all those stories in the right context and learn from their tactics. Sit back and enjoy the show. It is good to learn how to prepare users for radical changes. We never know if we can use some of those tactics for KDE 5 or 6.