Gartner: Vista Will Be the Last Windows

The Gartner group is predicting that the upcoming release of Vista will be the last major release of Windows.

The era of monolithic deployments of software releases is nearing an end and Microsoft will participate in the trend toward more flexible updates, Gartner forecast in a list of forecasts about 2007.

This doesn't make much sense to me. I certainly understand the trend toward more flexible incremental updates to software, and certainly Microsoft will continue to use such an approach to distribute patches and minor upgrades. But you cannot add significant new or changed functionality to any software worth its salt with an incremental update. Significant new functionality means wholesale changes to the system, which in turn means a major release.

So for Gartner's prediction to be right, Microsoft must plan to never add much functionality to their operating system after Vista. That just seems totally unlikely.