Prognostications 4

A.)OK, now Bill Gates officially walks away from Microsoft in two years even though Ozzie/Mundie begins Gates's duties almost immediately. When will Ballmer see the writing on the wall? Never, he will have to be taken out back and shot, and this is gonna be more pathetic than a loyal mutt being gassed at the local pound. Protecting his shareprice, Bill will most definitely be the one to tell Steve his ticket is no longer valid. The replacement will be an outsider, a hatchet wielding streamlining sonofabitch who will separate the wheat from the chaff and instill a real management culture in Redmond for the first time.
B.)Hopefully a new Board of Directors will appear. One of the decisions they will have to make eventually is to quit pussyfooting around and either split the company up or focus on SOMETHING, product-wise or service-wise, and do that SOMETHING really really well. Legally and ethically.
C.)Vista will most certainly be delayed, hopefully cancelled. A new OS has to be made from scratch, no more backwards compatibility. Kiss that NT code goodbye, like DOS (did you know DOS lies underneath XP? Instead of typing cmd in RUN, try typing command and see what happens...)
D.)OFFICE will continue to lose users such as students, average joe and jane consumers, governments and municipalities to OpenOffice suite and its own OfficeLive as well as Michael Robinson's latest online venture, ajaxlaunch.com until it offers affordable pricing and services on its across the board suite.
E.)WGA will be withdrawn and re-introduced
F.)Apple drops the bomb at Christmas '06 with MacMinis with XP APIs - no need to load up BootCamp, unless you have SLED as your second OS.