When I started in IT the dominant player was IBM. It's mainframes were just starting to be challenged by the likes of AS/400's, also from IBM, Dec VAX machines and the UNIX upstarts from the likes of Sun, HP and, you guessed it, IBM.
Big Blue dominated the IT landscape in a way that is unimaginable in today's market. PC's were referred to as genuine IBM's or inferior clones. Disk was often called DASD (Direct Access Serial Device), Errors were referred to as Abends. Job ads like "COBOL retrain to RPG/400 or PL/1" were commonplace. All IBM speak.
So what happended? Well nobody came along and built a better mainframe so IBM's fall from the top perch wasn't through like for like competition. It dominance was eroded on all fronts by the arrival of client server computing whose winners were the likes of Microsoft, HP, Sun, Oracle, Ingres, etc. For the record IBM didn't die, it adapted and is still a very successful IT company - but it doesn't dominate IT like it used to.
Many portray Microsoft as the natural successor to IBM and to my eyes Microsoft has started is downward decent from Top Dog to Also Ran. It still dominates the desktop OS and office productivity suites but apart from this its hits are thin on the ground. It does well with its RDBMS offering, SQL Server and the Xbox has made them a few quid. Where it has failed spectacularly was its inability to leverage its market dominance in the internet and now mobile internet. Bing, Zune and Windows Mobile are hardly destined for greatness, are they? Microsoft's great cash cow has always been Windows and Office software, mostly sold by default on the back of new PC and Laptop sales.
My question is that if we accept my previous assertion that we are on the cusp of a new paradigm of mobile computing driven by smartphones and especially tablet computers then what happens to the PC. If it goes out of fashion, initially in the home and laterly in the workplace, then what will become of Microsoft once its cash cow is slain? I suspect this is the question is keeping the lights burning in Redmond right now. And Cupertino and Mountain View
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