"Vista will be the last major release of Microsoft Windows," Gartner argues. "The next generation of operating environments will be more modular and will be updated incrementally. The era of monolithic deployments of software releases is nearing an end."

The rise of rivals such as Google has long led to speculation that Microsoft, which has become infamous for taking five years to develop Vista following the release of Windows XP, is going to increasingly lose its influence as Web applications become more popular.

Gartner, however, doesn't see Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and company leaving the stage quite so quickly. "Microsoft will be a visible player in this movement, and the result will be more-flexible updates to Windows and a new focus on quality overall."

Much of the anti-Microsoft hype has come from the blogosphere, so Microsoft executives might take some comfort in another Gartner prediction: that the number of bloggers will peak, and then begin to slowly decline, in mid-2007.

"Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers," Gartner argues. "Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007."
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