Decline and Fall

There is a natural cycle of dominance on this planet. The great geological ages have come and gone, the climate moves from ice age to global warming, the dinosaurs gave way to the mammals and ultimately to humankind.

Much the same happens to human activities. Within the last 100 years we have seen the position of dominant superpower pass from the Britain of Victoria to the United States, and now perhaps we are seeing that starting to move to China.

And so it is with ICT platforms and corporations. When I was a trainee programmer in the 1970s, one company dominated computing: IBM. At its heyday, almost 7 of every 10 mainframe computers sold were IBM's. Its competitors - the likes of Univac, Burroughs, Honeywell, Britain's ICL all failed to match 'Big Blue'. So what went wrong?

Well, the invention of the microprocessor. Still IBM could have kept its position: it had the first real 'Personal Computer' - indeed, IBM is responsible for the current widespread use of the term 'PC'. However, in a misjudgement of earth-shattering proportions, it allowed the IPR of the first PC operating system, DOS, to remain with the small subcontractor producing it - Microsoft. The rest, as they say, is history. Software, not hardware, was where the money was moving. IBM is by no means a small company now, but it is no longer such a market dominating force, and is now better known for services and business software than for hardware.

Which takes us to Microsoft. Its software is everywhere: most modern PCs run its Windows operating system, and so do a large proportion of the computer servers which run the significant business systems and networks that drive commerce. We all know Outlook, Word, Excel and so on. The de facto standard document types are .doc, .xls, .ppt - indeed, the very existence of such ways of describing file types is because of Windows.

But the first signs of decline are already detectable. Microsoft is dependent on us all buying licences for its software - and with a saturated market, that means we must buy new versions of old programmes, hence the huge publicity for the launch of Windows 7. But there are two trends, each still a trickle rather than a flood, but swelling in volume: software that is free for personal use, and the Cloud.

Free software is often open source, usually collaboratively developed; in the case of business use, it earns money for its developers through implementation and support services. The Cloud refers to software that is hosted on some remote server somewhere - where exactly the user does not need to know, any more than where a web site is hosted - and is accessed over the internet. This is typically charged as a simple fee per user per annum.

Many see the Cloud as the future for, at least, general office applications such as email, messaging, document sharing and intranets, and here one company is surging to the fore: Google, with its Google Apps offering.

The concept is appealing: many companies struggle to maintain their Microsoft Exchange servers, with volume constraints on mailboxes, down time for maintenance, constant upgrades and patches, and the overhead of resources to look after all this. Google Apps offers a service where almost all the business needs to do is configure its user accounts, and use the service. These applications still look a bit immature in places, but make up for that by taking a fresh approach to the user interface, and in speed of use (depending of course on the web connection).

It won't suit everyone, and there are still issues which some companies are nervous about, such as data security (not that Microsoft is exactly a byword for unhackable software), but nevertheless the ease of use, minimal staff overheads, and most of all costs currently often estimated at well under half those of an Exchange model, are creating a fast growing community.

Now Google is not exactly a small company already, and with Google Apps looking like one vision of the future, it would not surprise me to find that in ten years' time, Google will have become the dominant computer company of its age.

Tweet