IBM, Microsoft & Google Eras of Computing

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7 points·sridharvembu··3 comments

Part 1: I have been thinking about the dominance portion of this for a while, and you put it into words. Thanks!

And, adding another segment to it, in terms of market-share IBM was/is the #1 in mainframes, msft is the #1 in operating systems and google is the #1 in search (#1 in terms of market share), and none of these companies were beaten, by going head to head.

IBM's hardware was beaten by Microsoft's software, which was beaten by the Internet and google's search.

Part 2: The dominant technology company in a generation reaches its pinnacle at about half the size of the dominant company..

How do you define size? Is it purely a function of number of employees, in which case it would not be fair, since productivity, computing power, technology and frameworks have all grown as well.

Part 3: I like Rich Skrenta's take on this as well, the view is different and well worth a read, "Winner-Take-All: Google and the Third Age of Computing" http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_...

I use number of employees - I do agree productivity has increased, in fact, that is part of my point on why the dominant company could achieve its dominance with fewer people. In the limit, may be there will be a 1 person start-up that will be the dominant company of an era in future, and it will achieve its 15 minutes of fame ;-)

Thanks for pointing to Skrenta's post. I read Skrenta regularly, but I missed that one.

In the limit, may be there will be a 1 person start-up that will be the dominant company of an era in future, and it will achieve its 15 minutes of fame ;-)

Am I waiting for that day or what? :-)

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