Asks Preston Gralla, editor of Windowsdevcenter.com and OnDotNet, author of multiple Windows books, and 30 year IT veteran.

In his latest article, he laments Microsoft's lingering innovation drought:

"This reminds me of the days when Microsoft was the upstart, and old, ailing, stodgy IBM couldn’t seem to get out of the way of its own feet. There was a time, after all, when IBM and Microsoft were competitors, each vying to have the dominant operating system.

Microsoft was smaller, nimbler, smarter and hungrier. It won.

These days, Google appears to be nimbler and smarter. Microsoft won’t go away, just like IBM didn’t. But innovation and growth seem to be on Google’s side."

And Preston is just one of many independent Windows experts who are starting to doubt Microsoft. Paul Thurrott, Stan Beer, even John Dvorak are all declaring Microsoft the "new IBM".

Preston declares as he ends his article - "Unless Microsoft changes, and fast, I think its glory days are over."

MTC Take: Time to do a "CTRL-ALT-DEL".

Head on to Dan Bricklin's website to hear Bill exclaim in a faux British accent - "I put the sin in syntax, baby!!!"

haha "Time to do a 'CTRL-ALT-DEL'" very nice

And I would have to agree, I know Vista is still and beta, but it just runs ultra crappy! www.dl.tv has it running on the PC they use in the Podcast and it crashes all the time! and it's just slow as heck!

Anyway in other news Windows Vista Beta 2 just released for public use! Downloading it now, stuck at 0% though I wonder how many times it will crash.... haha

Update: I got Vista running on my computer and lets just say it's a RAM HOG! 850MB used while viewing the desktop on a fresh install!