“Pundits in the industry–including yours truly–have long been
saying that the greatest threat to Microsoft isn’t another large
company but rather someone no one has heard of. The idea sounded
good, but when we all started saying it, it was just a theory. Now
that theory is being put to the test. The concept has some history
behind it. From the sixties until the mid-eighties, IBM was the
clear master of the computing universe. While IBM saw larger
companies such as Digital Equipment Corp. and AT&T as its major
competitors, its role was actually usurped by the then-little-known
Microsoft. In the transition from big systems to personal
computers, a new leader emerged.”
“At first this was just a curiosity. But other “open-source”
software such as the Web server Apache and the scripting language
PERL soon appeared as well. Such software eventually became an
integral part of the Internet, running a huge percentage of the
Web–all without attracting too much notice. (We first covered
Linux in 1997 and Apache in 1996; later in this issue, we take a
closer look at the open-source movement.)”
“This poses a major threat to Microsoft, which has so far
jealously guarded its source code as the source of its great profit
margins. In fact, it has been pretty well blindsided by
open-source’s acceptance. Of course, Microsoft has faced its
distractions lately, in the form of a prolonged antitrust case,
just as IBM had been in when Microsoft first came to
prominence.”