Rebels need the Empire

The PC world is facing a crisis. It is a silent crisis, one that few people understand.

That crisis is the evil empire, or more specifically, the lack of an evil empire.

For the entire age of personal computers, we have had an evil empire. The empire changed over time, but there was always one. And that empire was the unifying force for the rebellion.

The first empire was IBM. Microcomputer enthusiasts were fighting this empire of large, expensive mainframe computers. We fought it with small, inexpensive (compared to mainframes) computers. We offered small, interactive, "friendly" programs written in BASIC in opposition to batch mainframe systems written in COBOL. The rebellion used Apple II, TRS-80, and other small systems to unite and fight for liberty. This rebellion was successful. So successful that IBM decided to get in on the personal computer action.

The second empire was also IBM. The IBM PC became the standard for computing, and the diverse set of computers prior to the IBM model 5150 was wiped out. Rebels refused to use IBM PCs and attempted to keep non-PC-compatible computers financially viable. That struggle was lost, and the IBM design became the standard design. Once Compaq introduced a PC-compatible (and didn't get sued) other manufacturers introduced their own PC compatibles. The one remnant of this rebellion was Apple, who made non-compatible computers for quite some time.

The third empire was Microsoft. The makers of IBM-compatible PCs needed an operating system and Microsoft was happy to sell them MS-DOS. IBM challenged Microsoft with OS/2 (itself a joint venture with Microsoft) but Microsoft introduced Windows and made it successful. Microsoft was so successful that its empire was, at times, considered larger and grander than IBM mainframe empire. The rebellion against Microsoft took some time to form, but it did arise as the "open source" movement.

But Microsoft has fallen from its position as evil empire. It still holds a majority of desktop computer operating systems, but the world of computing has expanded to web servers, smartphones, and cloud systems, and these are outside of Microsoft's control.

In tandem with Microsoft's decline, open source has become accepted as the norm. As such, it is no longer the rebellion. The software market exists in tripartite: Windows, macOS, and Linux. Each is an acceptable solution.

Those two changes -- Microsoft no longer the evil empire and open source no longer the rebellion -- mean that, at the moment, there is no evil empire.

Some companies have large market shares of certain segments. Amazon.com dominates the web services and cloud market -- but competitors are reasonable and viable options. Microsoft dominates the desktop market, especially the corporate desktop market, but Apple is a possible choice for the corporate desktop.

No one vendor controls the hardware market.

Facebook dominates in social media, but is facing significant challenges in areas of privacy and "fake news". Other media channels like Twitter are looking to gain at Facebook's expense.

Even programming languages have no dominant player. According to the November report from Tiobe, Java and C have been the two most popular languages and neither is gaining significantly. The next three (C++, Python, and VB.net) are close, as are the five following (C#, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, and Go). No language is emerging as a dominant language, as we had with BASIC in the 1980s and Visual Basic in the 1990s.

A world without an evil empire is a new world for us. Personal computers were born under an evil empire, operating systems matured under an evil empire, and open source became respectable under an evil empire. I like to think that such innovations were driven (or at least inspired) by a rebellion, an active group of people who rejected the market leader.

Today we have no such empire. Will innovation continue without one? Will we see new hardware, new programming languages, new tools? Or will the industry stagnate as major plays focus more on market share and less on innovation?

If the latter, then perhaps someday a new market leader will emerge, strong enough to win the title of "evil empire" and rebels will again drive innovation.