Waters is right to point to the sea shift that is underway at these large software technology companies, a shift away from big traumatic software upgrades to more frequent component bumps. The points that are often missed in these debates is that the focus on the customer obscures the fact that the companies themselves don’t want to continue to deliver software this way anymore, and equally important is that this is not simply a shift in how you develop and ship it, but how you price, support, promote, and build a partner program around these platforms.

For many of these companies the phrase “end of an era” may have deeper consequences as for some of them they will never again see the glory and success they once enjoyed. Microsoft will come out not just okay, I think they will come out of this a much stronger company.

FT.com / Technology – Vista marks end of an era for Microsoft:
That is partly because of what Mr Cusumano calls the internal “trauma” caused by its struggles with Vista. Never again: in future, he says, Microsoft will release less ambitious, and more frequent, updates to Windows.

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