"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Plummer said. "Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it."

Gartner's crystal ball also predicts Vista will be the last major release of Microsoft Windows, with the next generation of operating environments to be more modular and incrementally updated. The analyst group also predicts, by the end of 2007, 75 per cent of enterprises will be infected with targeted, financially motivated malware that evaded their traditional perimeter and host defenses.{moscomment}