“Although Microsoft is an immensely profitable institution, the
company will find it difficult to adapt to Internet computing
because of the way it is structured, Young said during speeches and
interviews at the 2000 World Congress on Information Technology
here. … Young and other insiders argue that Microsoft’s industry
dominance is more likely to be undone by market forces and
technological changes than by the recent antitrust ruling.”
“Customers already have seen the benefits [of] open-source
software, which allows people to freely modify and redistribute
underlying code, and they will begin to recoil against how
Microsoft maintains control over the source code for Windows, Young
said. … Microsoft… could retool to become a services company,
but the effort would require “a massive re-engineering of their
company. They would have to walk away from all of their royalties
first and then build a services company. I am not sure their
stockholders would tolerate that,” Young added.”
“The benefit we deliver is control to the customer,” he
said. “I’ve seen three great shifts in this industry. The first was
the mini-computer revolution. The second was the PC revolution.
Then came the Internet. The open-source movement is the fourth
great shift.”