The Big Three
The Big Three
In this situation the innovation rate of both software development technologies, as the interest in creating a sustainable competitive advantage by using ICT is not very well. That automatically means that there is no room to do large outsourcing projects anymore, even though India tries to evolve as the most cost efficient code programming country they simply don’t get enough orders to keep investing in this. Also the embedded market gets a tough time, only standard systems are used here and the declining interest reduce number sales. That automatically means that the large companies who offer standard software packages and off course Microsoft with Windows are celebrating their golden age, with profits never seen so high. For newcomers it’s almost impossible to establish, so the enthusiasm for ICT lowers even more. The open source community is only partly active, with some interesting projects going on, but this is almost completely amateurism driven, companies don’t see any future in new applications so are not willing to invest much in open source.
2005
The numbers of investments in ICT are going down. The economy is still not working very well; customers are more selective when spending money, after years of promising results in the market for wireless devices and other electronic gadgets the sales stagnates.
2006
The newly written book “ICT doesn’t matter” by Nicolas Carr enters the best selling list of 2006 . As companies are fed up with competing with each other while the competitor simply adapts to the most innovative companies by simply “stealing” methods and type of applications to do the same, the innovative drive of companies starts to slow down. It becomes clear that it ICT has just been a big hype. Companies are not willing to do big investments in new technologies anymore, but focus on making the current products more efficient instead. Microsoft releases Longhorn, but the new operating system is not doing very well, people were just getting used to Windows XP and are asking themselves why they would change.
2007
Because of the disappointing amounts of investments in outsourcing projects, from western companies, the Indian government decides to stop the stimulation of ICT related educations. Microsoft decides to buy Google in order to protect its monopoly. Although the demand for programmers is decreasing consultancy firms that are specialized in implementing and supporting solutions with large standard packages cause an increase in employment rate.
2008
The Olympic Games in Beijing are over now, after years of optimism and investments to improve the city the government doesn’t know what to do with the new infrastructure, the old buildings for example are empty now, this causes a panic reaction with the confidence in the Chinese technology market crashing as a result. The Mozilla.org foundation is abandoned because of the lack of support and therefore income. After short negotiations the US government decides to use Windows as their standard Operating system for both their servers and desktop environments. Also on the server market the use of Linux if declining, IBM decides to team up with Microsoft and offer cheap Windows Server solutions.
2009
As Windows XP support is slowly drying, the Longhorn operating system is slowly being picked up by the public, but Microsoft is not planning any new releases of its operating system. Fortunately for Microsoft open source software is far from popular right now, so Microsoft keeps its steady sales. The other companies, such as Oracle and SAP (these three companies are also known as the big three) are also doing well, it’s clear that companies choose for standard software packages at this time instead of creating something innovative. IBM completely abandons its Linux strategy.
2010
Various Linux companies such as Red Hat, Ximian and Lindows go bankrupt. Other projects without any commercial targets are being slowed down because the lack of contribution and declining number of amateur developers. On the server front Windows is also emerging as the number one deliverer.
2011
Bill Gates is again named as the richest person of the world, with Larry Ellison from Oracle again second. Instead of something totally new, Microsoft starts offering a DVD containing Longhorn, and all software you could ever need. This means a breakthrough for Longhorn, customers like the completeness of a package like this, no puzzling with searching for other software anymore.
2012
It’s clear that the large software companies are generating a lot of sales. Consultancy firms and large software companies are celebrating a golden age. Almost no money is being put in innovations in terms of software development.