Brad excited by what he saw at PDC.
Brad Feld, venture capitalist: 2006 Will Be The Year of Microsoft.
[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

A surefire way of getting linked on Robert Scoble's highly rated and ranked blog is to say something promising about Microsoft, or to say something negative about Microsoft in a way that Mr. Scoble can easily defuse while pretending to agree with you (such as http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/16.html#a11174, where Scoble subtly claims that Balmer was being misinterpreted). In this case, a VC was drunk on the PDC, and like many before him presumed that everything Microsoft spins is gold. Many foolish predictions have come out of such a situation.

In any case, while Microsoft will continue to do very well by any definition, it's quite a stretch to call 2006 the year of Microsoft.

• SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 will barely be out of the gates, having come out (hopefully) at the end of this year - I believe early November. It will be quite some time before legacy shops (which are of course the bulk of SQL Server customers. The RDBMS market isn't a heavily expanding market, and is largely selling to existing customers or trying to steal customers from your competitors) will upgrade their SQL Server installs, especially given the large schism to 2005. Visual Studio 2005 is a great product, but it's largely an upgrade/maintenance release for the existing Visual Studio base, a large percentage of which are on the MSDN program anyways and thus will upgrade at no revenue advantage to Microsoft.
• Vista will see adoption among the leading edge, and of course will replace XP on new PCs (to no gain to Microsoft), but it will see negligible adoption in corporations. Many corporations haven't even modernized to XP at this point, 4 years after its release and despite it being a minor difference from 2000. Vista represents a pretty large transition.
• Office 2006 is similar to Vista - it'll take years to see heavy adoption in the corporate space, and otherwise will largely be sales to new buyers (who will just be getting 2006 instead of its closest competitor, Office 2003).
  
• Many of Microsoft's new technology platforms will see negligible adoption in the first, and even second, year. This is just experience talking, but there is a long list of examples of highly lauded Microsoft technologies that struggled or saw little adoption for years (.NET being an excellent case. By now we were supposed to be awash in .NET applications. While it is a superlative web platform, and was a critical upgrade to classic ASP, the desktop world has been barely impacted by .NET at all, against most predictions)

Undoubtedly Microsoft has some great products, but we're talking about a company that needs to maintain a revenue of $10 billion a quarter, and with programs like software assurance and the MSDN program, these upgrades are long overdue. If anything, these releases are about avoiding a loss of revenue stream rather than an increase of revenue stream.