The most telling finding is the bleak five-year outlook predicted by most managers if Microsoft continues on its current path. And yet, a majority (73 percent) do not want to see the government force Microsoft to bundle competing products with its OS, and a narrower majority (54 percent) feel Microsoft should not be legally compelled to open all its APIs.

Despite significant concern that Microsoft's market behavior is out of hand, managers appear even more wary of a protracted legal battle and the chaos that would likely ensue than they are of an unchecked Microsoft.

Is the fear justified? See how three of our editors predict what lies ahead, as well as more findings from our survey.

Christy Hudgins-Bonafield , business and trends editor, has been following the antitrust case against Microsoft since it began. She's raised the hackles of some readers who think her articles reflect a pro-Microsoft bias. In truth, although she's taken pains to present all sides of the debate, she believes that business, Microsoft's competitors and even Microsoft itself may well benefit from appropriate government intervention.

What will the computing environment be like in five years if Microsoft continues with its current strategy? I'm inclined to agree with the opinion of almost 80 percent of our survey respondents, who fear the operating system will balloon into obesity as Microsoft continues to level competitors by bundling applications with its OS. And since Microsoft is a business with its eye on the bottom line, not computing utopias, it won't always embrace the best-of-breed application. But we'll all likely have to live with whatever technology Microsoft chooses for its own reasons or the technology it develops--primarily because competition tends to vanish once an application is available for free as part of Windows or Windows NT.

As the OS bulks up, Microsoft's customers pay a price. As enticing as it might be to have free applications as part of the OS, the increased complexity invariably comes at the expense of performance and reliability, already the Achilles' heel of Windows and NT. Imagine if Microsoft's OS developers were freed from the burden of continually incorporating application after application in the OS. We could expect basic performance, scalability and reliability all to improve. It's also conceivable that a more stable OS could reduce today's hardware churn. Instead of requiring constant hardware upgrades to accommodate the newest OS--padded with applications that many of us never use--a more streamlined OS could extend hardware life.