Stories by: Galen Gruman

The writing is on the wall. Despite a major push to sell the much-maligned Windows Vista, customers aren't buying. Nearly two years after Vista's release, Windows XP remains the standard desktop OS in business, and Microsoft has extended its availability three times (currently to August 2009) due to customer demand. Microsoft itself forecasts just 2 percent growth in Vista sales in early 2009, after lackluster sales in 2008. And that's after forcing customers to buy Vista to get XP "downgrades."

At a conference that devoted much of its attention to celebrating the rise of collaborative platforms, media, and technologies, you had to wonder if the "Web 2.0" collaborative future would die before it really began. That was my takeaway from the Demo Fall 2008 conference in San Diego, which gave 72 startups six minutes each to show their stuff, usually in beta form.

The increased use of the Web for collaborative activities, from music sharing to restaurant recommendations, is beginning to creep into business for useful things. At the Demo Fall 2008 conference in San Diego, several companies demonstrated collaboration systems for project management designed for workgroups of various sizes.

Most of the world, it seemed, drank the Steve Jobs Kool-Aid about the new iPhone being a BlackBerry killer when the Apple CEO first announced the device earlier this year. But after nearly two weeks with the new iPhone 2.0 software on my iPod Touch, I can tell you that Apple has not yet delivered on that promise.

Judging from initial accounts, the next version of the Mac OS X, named Snow Leopard, will be aimed squarely at business and enterprise users, signaling a formal push by Apple to take Windows head on outside the consumer and education markets. "Apple is taking the Mac OS one step closer to the enterprise," says Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

For most people, Bill Gates and Microsoft are one and the same. Gates has led Microsoft to global dominance in the 33 years since its founding, combining a strong opportunism -- getting the code for DOS to sell to IBM for the first PC and aping Apple's visual interface for the first Windows are the two best examples of Gates' moving where the wind was soon to blow -- with a steady vision of desktop computers being as powerful as the mainframes that captured techies' imaginations in the 1970s.

Bill Gates retired from Microsoft a decade ago, yet his ghost still loomed large, in the form of a persistent effort to continually extend the reach of Microsoft into every nook and cranny possible. And that ghost inhabited a company increasingly focused inward on its own view of what users should want and do. Like Windows Vista and Windows 7 before it, Windows UT (Unlimited Technology) captured a smaller share of upgrades than its predecessor. Ditto with Office UT. Even though Microsoft paid attention to hardware resource requirements in UT and didn't wield the new software as a way to force users to buy new hardware as its last several versions had done, feature fatigue had set in. For most people, Office 2000 and Windows XP did the job they needed, and learning a new UI every few years was simply not in the cards for a user base that had long thought of technology not as a shiny toy to play with but instead as a tool that needed to get the job done and stay out of the way.

Microsoft's a dinosaur that didn't know its dead yet. The cloud computing meteor was speeding its way, and when pervasive computing in the cloud became a reality in about 2015, Microsoft was all but dead. Why? Because the Windows and Office revenues collapsed as users finally stop buying upgrades they don't need, and cloud offerings via the browser took their place. Poof! Gone was 80 percent of Microsoft's profits. And gone was the money to invest in technologies that took multiple versions to get right -- if they ever got it right -- such as the Xbox, Zune, Microsoft Dynamics, and MSN.

For investors, the 2011-2015 era was pure hell when it came to Microsoft. Windows 7 and Office 2010 followed Windows Vista and Office 2007 as duds, gaining minimal adoption, mainly as preinstalled software on new computers. For several years, Microsoft had been working in its server group on desktop and application streaming technologies meant to help datacenters better manage far-flung users. By 2011, it became clear that Microsoft should provide its OS and core apps over the cloud to everyone, not just give that capability to enterprise datacenters, as application streams.

With the release of Apple's iPhone SDK now come and gone, and the enhanced IT-oriented capabilities planned for the next major iPhone device and software update now unveiled, it's clear that iPhones are going to be corporate mainstays. Still, at its heart, the iPhone is a consumer device, so IT leaders still have to ensure that the iPhones that come in the door fit their data management and security strategies, even with Apple's new enterprise security capabilities.

About a year and a half ago, executives at several companies were bemoaning the high energy costs and the difficulty of getting enough energy electricity to their datacenters. It's not an uncommon concern among IT execs, but this group did more than kvetch. They banded together and sought other companies to join them. In February 2007, the Green Grid was born, and in less than a year grew to more than 100 members.