I don't agree at all. Microsoft has the most impressive development system in the world. Visual Studio is unbeatable for cheap, rapid and robust development. It is being used on trading floors everywhere, for example. I don't know what you mean by bloatware in MS Office. Microsoft dumped Clippy a long time ago. I use pretty much every feature in Excel 2003, and I find the added features in Excel 2007 to be amazing and very useful. I don't use Word very much, but I'm sure that professional Word users feel the same way about Word's rich feature set. Not everyone has a need for the advanced analytic and data tools in Excel, but some people do and it makes no sense to strip out these features just because not everyone uses them.

By the way, if Windows is dead as a development platform, then what exactly is the alternative? OS X? Give me a break. Who in their right mind thinks that OS X is going to replace Windows in the business enviornment? Microsoft has a target audience of morons, but Apple doesn't? Hah. Is Linux going to kill Microsoft? That's an old prophesy from the dotcom bubble days which has pretty much been proven incorrect. Linux is only sensible in in specialized server enviornments, provided that you can afford the increased total cost of ownership involved (hiring a team of Unix administrators, spending countless manhours editing the nightmare of configuration files in Linux, dealing with interoperability issues, etc, etc).

I have a lot of respect for Graham, but I really don't agree with him on this. Just because Apple sells more MP3 players than Microsoft, I should move my mission criticial business infrastructure to OS X? Or I'm going to be turning all of my software, including Office, into a website? Why on Earth would I ever want Excel to be a website? I've seen some web-based institutional trading systems, and they simply cannot compete with a native application. No way in hell do I want my trading platform to depend on Internet Explorer or Firefox. This whole "all applications will be web-based" idea is just a new spin on a very very old concept that we used to call the dumb terminal and the mainframe. Only software developers who want to RENT software on a monthly basis and want total control over users are pushing for a return to the dumb terminal. Sun Micro also tried to revive the dumb terminal a few years ago with their Java thin client and that was a complete failure as well.

Finally, I would like to say that my computer is running faster than ever before (I'm running Windows Vista). With the right hardware, I am able to do more things much faster than ever before, even after the ever-increasing hardware requirement of new software.