Is it finally over for Microsoft Windows?

Provocative title, except I do not intend it  to be.

This weekend was an upgrade weekend at Casa de Vlad. I upgraded my Macbook Air to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I upgraded my desktop to Windows 7. These are the best the two companies can produce.

Snow Leopard: I connected my USB DVD to my Macbook Air, slipped in the DVD and powered it on. I clicked on about 3 OK / Welcome / Next buttons and went to sleep. This morning, I woke up to 10.6 seemingly a bit faster, same experience and behaviors with some more polished effects (Expose)

Windows 7: Later this afternoon I upgraded my Vista development system to Windows 7. Well, I tried, it failed. So I put in a new set of hard drives. First time Windows 7 failed because it couldn’t setup a system partition – it told me to look at Windows Setup Logs but provided no information on how to find those. It just failed and took me back to the start of the setup. So I created and formatted a partition, rebooted and this time setup worked. After a reboot it couldn’t find bootloader. Ok, try again. This time it worked.

One of these is an OS built in 2009, the other one feels like it’s still 1999.

I think we are at a time where Microsoft’s big TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) argument will come back to bite them in the most unfortunate way: are Windows systems too expensive for business if they impact knowledge workers for more than a day?