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Seriously, I see a desktop like KDE, the easy development and scripting features, toolkits like Qt (the Qt 4 plans are interesting), development environments like Mono or Java, the good work on freedesktop on the X server, D-BUS, Cairo and HAL and I have come to an inescapable conclusion.

With the right level of vision and integration work (and that's the killer) we can have much of what Microsoft claims is innovative in Longhorn up and running, on today's hardware (there's a lot of really redundant 3D hardware in many organizations), today. Not in two, three or four years time - now. That's no joke, because the infrastructure is actually there.

Since many companies are still using NT 4 and 2000 (which Microsoft hailed as the technology for the next ten years) and are grappling with support issues for their existing VB5 (Microsoft withdrew support and that was bad enough) and VB6 apps, they've got more than enough on their plate than looking at the swish new Windows with features that they're just not capable of using. I don't just mean that in a hardware sense, because there is a serious amount of core business logic that no one is going to move. Longhorn may sound swish, but if the responsibility fell on your shoulders to move all of the custom applications over could you be bothered?

IT has reached a critical mass in terms of being part of the infrastruture of an organization. How often does your employer rip out all of their phones, replace the photocopiers and fax machines and replace the furniture? They do it very sparingly, if ever, and they never do mass big-bang migrations or updates. That is what Microsoft is facing, because upgrades in this environment are better suited to support and services deals and contracts, not mass sales of boxes of software. As well as the software, Microsoft is asking companies to fund support, upgrade and development contracts, all to upgrade to a new OS? It may have been realistic five or more years ago, it isn't now.

If Microsoft were a bit disappointed with XP they'll be really disappointed with Longhorn. It is not that people don't want to, it is just that the pace of change is much slower (we have phones from the 1980s in our place and they work fine), people can't be bothered and in many cases, people just can't.