“True innovation in most industries springs from the smallest
players. The biggest hitters with the biggest R&D budgets may
belt out the biggest incremental breakthroughs. But the small fries
are the ones dictating the pace of change, either by developing
products that defy convention or by pushing industry incumbents to
start thinking out of the box…”
“Even the operating system market is being changed by upstart
competition. Microsoft and a handful of Unix vendors still
dominate. But as senior editor Mitch Wagner reports in his page 1
story, Red Hat, Turbo-Linux and other start-ups are raising the
stakes by making Linux more scalable and easier to configure.”
“The ruling class is clearly alarmed. When Microsoft
president Steve Ballmer tells the world that Internet company
market caps are wildly inflated, he does so not on a whim but to
knock down the stock prices and undercut the momentum of upstart
rivals. If the ensuing panic drains $1 billion from Ballmer’s
own net worth in the short term, it’s a relatively small price for
slowing down the Internet and Linux companies marching on
Windows.”