The next two years will be crucial for software giant Microsoft. Under attack on numerous fronts, it could falter – or fight back to become even more dominant. That’s the way an interesting article on the topic starts on BBC homepage.

Starting by criticizing Microsoft multiple security issues or ar cry from real life projects like M.Home the article is making a short round-up of the more increased Microsoft competition on various fields from search, to operating systems, browsing or even the popular Office suite.

“Companies are not afraid of competing with Microsoft anymore,” says Marc Benioff, the boss of salesforce.com, which offers a service over the internet which competes with Microsoft in the lucrative market for “customer relationship management” software.

Here is Microsoft’s problem: while rivals try to pick off its software offering one by one, new ways of writing software – for example open source – speed up the pace of innovation and threaten Microsoft’s business model.

The fate of “Longhorn” is a case in point. The much-heralded successor to Windows XP is badly delayed and key components won’t be ready for launch.