Vision matters. Leadership matters. Timing matters. Soon, Microsoft may not.

After you read the web's musings, print out this article and stuff it in the bottom of your sock drawer. Five years from now, pull it out, read my next sentence, and compare it to the reality of that future day.

Microsoft is teetering on irrelevancy.
 
Oh, the industry-leading software company will remain more than merely solvent for the foreseeable future -- after all, it has a humongous installed base and an army of talented developers -- but the world is going mobile and Microsoft is playing catch-up.

As any computer-savvy homo sapien who hasn’t been vacationing in Ulaanbaatar for the last few months knows, Microsoft is about to release its long-awaited Windows 8. To that I say, “Big whoop.”

Windows 8 won’t play well with business. Its whiz-bang Metro user interface, growing as it did out of Windows Phone 7, works best with new software written for touchscreen devices such as Microsoft’s own Surface tablet-cum-keyboard. For the standard apps used in the business world in which Microsoft dominates, Windows 8 drops you back onto a near-conventional desktop, causing UI whiplash.

Quick question: Say you’re an enterprise sysadmin, and you’ve recently upgraded your company to the stable, well-proven Windows 7. Are you going to recommend to your CTO the option of ditching all that work and adopting and training users on a brand-new OS in which the familiar desktop UI is a second-class citizen? Thought not.

But what about the wonderful Brave New World of smartphones and tablets -- the world into which computing is moving lickety-split, even in the enterprise market where the BYOD (bring your own device) movement is flooding otherwise tightly controlled environments with iOS and Android devices?

Well, Redmond has a version of Windows 8 for that market called Windows RT (which, for you geeks, stands for runtime; you normal human beings need not worry about that). Windows RT, however, won’t run on the Intel chips that Windows 8 -- and, for that matter, OS X -- calls home. Instead, Windows RT is designed for the ARM processor architecture also used by iOS and Android.
 
Without some as-yet-unannounced software trickery, all those squillions of traditional Windows apps in which people have already invested won’t run on Windows RT tablets. Microsoft will need to convince -- bribe? -- developers to either recode their apps for Windows RT or write new ones from scratch. Good luck.

So what advantage will Windows 8 and Windows RT have in the marketplace? To this observer’s eyes the answer is “None.” Well, maybe not exactly zero, seeing as how some of those thin and light “Ultrabooks™” that Intel is flogging may have touchscreens that can take advantage of touchy-feely Metro gestures. But it remains to be seen whether notebook users will want to poke and prod their displays.

Microsoft may simply be too late. Apple has the proprietary “walled-garden” mobile market pretty well sewn up, and Google’s Android not only has its share of fans, but its free open-source license attracts manufacturers in a way that Windows RT’s licensing fees most certainly will not -- they’re rumored to be as high as $85 per device.

So if someone asks you if you think Microsoft’s next operating system will succeed, may I suggest that you answer with another question: “Why should it?” Microsoft had its day in the sun, but its lack of vision and plodding leadership may have doomed it to decline.

A bit of history: when Steve Jobs rejoined Apple, the company’s stock sold for around four bucks per share. It has since soared well over $600. When Steve Ballmer took over as Microsoft CEO, Redmond’s stock was tickling the backside of $60 per share. As I write this, it’s hovering at around $30.

Vision matters. Leadership matters. Timing matters. Soon, Microsoft may not.