An article in InfoWorld discusses whether Longhorn will have enough compelling features to convince users of Windows systems to upgrade. The article goes into details about why it is difficult for Microsoft to create a best of breed anything and it seems that the answer is they are just too big.

In my non-expert opinion, Microsoft would be best served broken up into pieces and let the individual pieces go along and innovate. Once you create this huge monster that just continues to grow and grow it has to move slower and slower while the little competition can more readily move around and adjust to the market’s habits.

Longhorn will be good, because Microsoft has gotten increasingly better with each iteration of Windows (with the exception of ME) and having this one fail would be no less than a total disaster. However, they are still safe (yes, you can be safe from a total disaster) because many firms are still not convinced of moving to Linux. If that ever occurs and Linux reaches the tipping point in IT conversion then we can again begin to have fun and ridicule the new open source monopoly.