Technology winners and losers

Technology has been remarkably stable for the past three decades. The PC dominated the hardware market and Microsoft dominated the software market.

People didn't have to use PCs and Microsoft Windows. They could choose to use alternative solutions, such as Apple Macintosh computers with Mac OS. They could use regular PCs with Linux. But the people using out-of-mainstream technology *chose* to use it. They knew what they were getting into. They knew that they would be a minority, that when they entered a computer shop that most of the offerings would be for the other, regular Windows PCs and not their configuration.

The market was not always this way. In the years before the IBM PC, different manufacturers provided different systems: the Apple II, the TRS-80, DEC's Pro-325 and Pro-350, the Amiga, ... there were many. All of those systems were swept aside by the IBM PC, and all of the enthusiasts for those systems knew the pain of loss. They had lost their chosen system to the one designated by the market as the standard.

In a recent conversation with a Windows enthusiast, I realized that he was feeling a similar pain in his situation. He was dejected at the dearth of support for Windows phones -- he owned such a phone, and felt left out of the mobile revolution. Windows phones are out-of-mainstream, and many apps do not run on them.

I imagine that many folks in the IT world are feeling the pain of loss. Some because they have Windows phones. Others because they have been loyal Microsoft users for decades, perhaps their entire career, and now Windows is no longer the center of the software world.

This is their first exposure to loss.

The grizzled veterans who remember CP/M or Amiga DOS have had our loss; we know how to cope. The folks who used WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 had to switch to Microsoft products, they know loss too. But no technology has been forced from the market for quite some time. Perhaps the last was IBM's OS/2, back in the 1990s. (Or perhaps Visual Basic, when it was modified to VB.NET.)

But IT consists of more than grizzled veterans.

For someone entering the IT world after the IBM PC (and especially after the rise of Windows), it would be possible -- and even easy -- to enjoy a career in dominant technologies: stay within the Microsoft set of technology and everything was mainstream. Microsoft technology was supported and accepted. Learning Microsoft technologies such as SQL Server and SharePoint meant that you were on the "winning team".

A lot of folks in technology have never known this kind of technology loss. When your entire career has been with successful, mainstream technology, the change is unsettling.

Microsoft Windows Phone is a technology on the edge. It exists, but it is not mainstream. It is a small, oddball system (in the view of the world). It is not the "winning team"; iOS and Android are the popular, mainstream technologies for phones.

As Microsoft expands beyond Windows with Azure and apps for iOS and Android, it competes with more companies and more technologies. Azure competes with Amazon.com's AWS and Google's Compute Engine. Office Online and Office 365 compete with Google Docs. OneDrive competes with DropBox and BOX. Microsoft's technologies are not the de facto standard, not always the most popular, and sometimes the oddball.

For the folks confronting a change to their worldview that Microsoft technology is always the most popular and most accepted (to a worldview that different technologies compete and sometimes Microsoft loses), a example to follow would be ... Microsoft.

Microsoft, after years of dominance with the Windows platform and applications, has widened its view. It is not "the Windows company" but a technology company that supplies Windows. More than that, it is a technology company that supplies Windows, Azure, Linux, and virtual machines. It is a company that supplies Office applications on Windows, iOS, and Android. It is a technology company that supplies SQL Server on Windows and soon Linux.

Microsoft adapts. It changes to meet the needs of the market.

That's a pretty good example.