Back in the Saddle

2005

The expectations of end 2004 were becoming reality. India was moving more and more towards a dominating software development country. Larger companies were showing interest in outsourcing, and maybe even moving to lower-wage countries. George W. Bush the 43rd President of the United States was looking anxious at the predictions made by the ministry of economics. Something had to be done, but what? Using import tariffs or other tax-based policies would have been un-called for, the US-economy was not in a slow-down, but the IT industry was giving George some head-aches. George asked one of his experts to draw up some different solutions and come up with an effective solution.

2006

The Bush Administration decided that is best to stimulate the US economy and business to use local created software in stead of outsourcing to low-wage countries. The US government created a campaign to support US-Software, and encouraged companies like Oracle and Microsoft to keep developing in the US in stead of India.

Early in 2006 the IT-industry finally realized that in order to stay in the grace of the government and still be cost-effective, newer innovations were needed to keep costs down. More money was put into innovation. But no significant results were produced in this year.

2007

All the hard work paid off! The IT industry worked together with research universities like MIT and came up with quite useful innovations to cut costs on software development projects. The costs of coding would in some cases be down with 60%! Innovations like easy-to-use neural networks, efficient object oriented code generating made it easy for every John Doe to create simple programs like address-databases on the web.

These developments were an enormous impulse for the open source community. Whereas open source community used to be know for their nerdish Linux and php solutions, now produced high quality software with ease. The open source part of these programs made it even safer! This highly enthusiastic community went searching for bugs and possible security issue’s and took great pride in finding one!

2008

Already at the start of 2008 rebels in the community were talking about brining the giant Microsoft to a fall with better software, although the general perception was a bit more conservative. A lot of applications were getting developed on the windows platform, browsers and office packages. The standard software packages slowly were loosing market share.

At the end of 2008 it was total anarchy on the market, 20 different browsers, 25 office packages, and an incredible amount of other software. It was clear Microsoft was loosing the battle for the standard software. Strangely enough, almost all of the developed software relied on windows as the operating system.

Around Christmas Bill Gates announced a new Microsoft strategy: unbloating. He noticed the weak position of Microsoft software and wanted to save whatever was possible to be saved: windows as the nr. One operating system!

2009

Meanwhile, across the great pond in the EU a real cool innovation was made. An automatic method connector utility was introduced. This severely shortened the time needed to get different programs to work with each other.

In India things were not looking so good; the increased attention to software development in the US had led to a serious decrease in work for the software developers in India. The costs to innovate were too high and therefore not a possibility. A change to give support and services as well was not an option because most companies grand those jobs to locally based companies.

2010

This year started out with a big bang in India, the outsourcing hype in the US and EU is officially over and the US was clearly back in the Saddle in software development. Open source was flourishing like never before and got their hands on some sweet projects for Nokia and Q-tek, both renowned developers of mobile devices. In mid 2010 SAP came in rough water, the decreased sales of SAP finally took its toll. Mass reorganizations and cutting staff was the only solution to give the hard breathing company some air.

More and more companies were choosing for open sources smaller modules. The open source community was getting standardized and more professional. Support and Service finally became focus points for these companies and things were looking good.

2011

Nobody expected it, the annual shareholders meeting of Google. A couple of Microsoft managers attended as mere goodwill. Somewhere during the long speech of Larry page he said: “Our next development will shake things up in Redmond the coming year.” The people from Microsoft startled, did we miss anything, what happened? Larry continued: “In one year from now we will introduce Google OS 1.0, a free operating system designed to work with the all of the current developed open source software. TCO will be significant lower than windows as well as costs.

By this time the Microsoft people were already on the phone,” Mr. Gates? We might have a problem here!”

In this year Open Source SAP(OSSAP) is introduced and is being tested on a small scale. Not many companies are already very enthusiastic to change from SAP to OSSAP, although the TOC seems to be far lower.

2012

Bill Gates did not see Google OS 1.0 as a threat, its open source, its buggy, and Google has never produced software before, I see no problem in this. Sure we might loose a couple of % of market share. Within months things will be the same.

He was right, Google OS was not the big hit Larry Page expected, but it was a reasonable successful attack. Microsoft already lost the battle for office software and now was being attacked on their last remaining cash cow.

The open source community reacted somewhat disappointed towards the failure of Google OS 1.0 although they did not really do anything to prevent it from failing. It seems the world is not quite ready for the extinction of Microsoft although this is not certain for the coming future.