Does Microsoft have any real competition? Copyright (c) 2003 Gregory S. Diehl In a word, yes.
And I think they’re about to get more.
Microsoft dominates mainly in operating systems and office productivity software.
Windows will be the dominant operating system for a while. But I think things will get a lot more interesting with the Novell/SuSE merger. The giant IBM was already behind Linux. (People forget that if IBM’s software division were a separate company, it would be number two just for Microsoft.) Now, they’re challenged by a company that knows how to market to the company, which Red Hat doesn’t. SuSE gets the channels and business partners it needs around the world; Novell can ensure its survival beyond NetWare as a competitor to the hated Microsoft. (Novell feels just as strongly for the people of the Northwest as Sun does.)
And speaking of Sun, they are aggressively pushing StarOffice as an alternative to Microsoft Office. It offers file compatibility, so anyone on a budget may want to at least consider it. Corel also sticks with WordPerfect and other products, and Novell has GroupWise. So there’s at least some competition in office productivity, admittedly not much. StarOffice is now available in the retail channel, so that may change.
With Sun and IBM pushing Java/J2EE as the platform for web services, .NET is getting all the competition it can handle. For dynamic web publishing (updating from a database), I seem to see at least as many pages with .jsp (java server pages) or .php (hypertext preprocessor) as .asp (active server pages, from Microsoft) in the file name. (If you’ve ever wondered what those weird things were that weren’t .htm or .html, this is it!)
There are two areas where Microsoft isn’t even close to first place.
Most web servers are Apache running on Linux, not Microsoft’s Internet Information Server on a Windows box.
In the database arena, Microsoft really faces some stiff competition. IBM is still number one with DB2 and Oracle is close behind. While SQL Server 2000 is much more robust and enterprise-ready than its predecessors, it still ranks third. (Although in a tighter third place with the scalability and other features of SQL Server 2000.) In the bulleted charts is MySQL, the Linux of the database world that is gaining more market share in companies that don’t need the features of DB2 or Oracle. .
So does Microsoft have competition? Yes, even in near-monopoly areas, there is at least some competition.
