The IT Wars

The history of IT is littered with lots of technical, idealogical and mindshare wars. A few examples are listed below:

The desktop wars: Microsoft Windows vs IBM OS/2
The server wars: Mainframe vs midrange
The RDBMS wars: Oracle vs Ingres
The browser wars: Internet Explorere vs Netscape
The Search Engine Wars: Google vs Yahoo

My question today is: Where is todays IT war?

I just can't think of one. Yes, there's lots of competition out there, but I can't think of a really big battlefront that is dividing IT departments right down the middle. Years ago lots of committed IT people were passionate about their decisions and allegiances.

I suppose the answer is that IT has matured to the point where everything is pretty much a commodity. I saw evidence of this when I was recently interviewed for a Data Warehouse Architecture role for a SME software house. Idealogically I hit it off with my potential boss and I know that it could have been a great opportunity for both me and the firm. However they were at that point of selecting a BI technology stack to develop their products and had correctly concluded that technically it was pretty much of a muchness out there. The selection therefore was made on commercial and not technical grounds, which didn't go my way. No hard feelings as I totally understood and endorsed their logic of their decision.

My issue with all of this is however, is that each of these wars have been fought out in an emerging arena that changed the face of IT. Using the examples above there are:

The adoption of the PC as a business tool
The challenge to mainframes from lower cost midrange computers
The move from flat file and hierarchical database to SQL
The internet explosion

So if there isn't a war being fought then I'd derive from that the fact that we aren't on the cusp of a new technological revolution - which for me is a great shame.