Microsoft

To interpret this position of dominance we need to take a little trip back in time to the last century. Back to the sixties, a decade which will have nostalgic significance for any baby-boomers reading this. Extraordinary as it may seem today, this was an era when caftans and beads were considered fashionable. Not for IBM employees, however, who seemed to be well paid, mostly young men in neat blue suits and white shirts, and it must be said, also bore a disturbing resemblance to Mormons. In Australia, even their engineers wore suits. Which was almost unique. Most organisations dressed their engineers in overalls. If your IBM system should misbehave itself, a couple of regular IBM engineers, dressed in shiny black shoes and regulation dark blue suits would arrive at your site, bearing large heavy blue boxes, looking, for all the world, like members of the Church of Latter Day Saints. Unlike the latter, these clean-cut young men didn't want your prayers and money, just your money. The defective equipment would be covered up and placed in one of the boxes and whisked quietly away. Order had been restored and the Universe was a safer place. And the Universe seemed to be mostly IBM or IBM-compatible. By the end of the sixties, Big Blue had grabbed a slice of the IT pie that was considered by most to be somewhere in excess of ninety per cent. Despite some malcontents who complained about IBM's tactics, the computer giant continued to grow throughout the sixties and the seventies.

By the time the eighties arrived, IBM seem to have undisputed market dominance. However, there were several problems for the IT giant. A long legal action with the Department of Justice and a looming microcomputer revolution were causing some concern. How IBM lost their extraordinary dominance was, in part, due to a foolish deal the company made with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. There are many things that under-pinned this remarkable act of corporate self-demolition, but we should give credit to the guile of the architect of that famous deal. However, the decline in IBM's market dominance was not entirely due to Bill's evil genius. A large part of IBM's undoing was due to their own arrogance. They refused to take the microcomputer seriously. And when firms like Apple began to show that the PC was more than just a toy, IBM was finally forced to respond in some fashion. The response was to quickly throw together an OEM package, using off-the-shelf hardware

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