Scenario 2: "Fight Club"

Scenario 2 “Open era”

2006-2007
The software vendors will keep on growing, becoming bigger and more monopolistic. The buyers will hate the endless cycles of upgrades and complex maintenance and support agreements that the big vendors offer. But a big vendor promises more longevity and suites that are often easier to integrate than the best-of-breed applications from many smaller vendors. This makes the big vendors a little slack in their innovation and technological updates. Since the big buyers are buying from these vendors, the vendor tries to extend monopoly to small or individual buyers too. The smaller buyers now face the burden of increasing cost, constant upgrades and little choice between the providers. The buyers start getting angry over the situation. The big software vendors start facing antitrust motions from NGO’s and buyers. The number of cases against monopoly intensifies in the coming future. Governments in order to settle the situation lend its support to open source software creation. The governments hope that this will lead to technological revolution in software industry boosting the economy as a whole.

2008-2009
With the increase in the number of lawsuits against Microsoft, the other major service vendors like Google starts creating their own operating system along with other service software to fill in the niche.

The industry is then divided into two types of software creation

• Better and powerful operating systems and
• Internet platform based application and services, and open source based application and software projects.

This leads to two types of competition. On one hand for creating powerful operating system, competition comes from different corners of earth like India, Israel etc. On the other hand in the service sector the major player’s faces competition from all direction. Smaller companies that specialize in one type of software service are able to create software better and faster than the big players the reason being the big players used to getting their way have lost the sharp edge of powerful technological innovation.

Yet only creation of new operating system is not enough, it is also important to get an ally along with hardware manufacturer to support distribution of the operating system. Similarly it is also important to maintain consistency to keep the reluctant to change consumer satisfied. Thus new operating system has front end similar to Windows. The companies preparing for the launch of their own operating system, against Windows from Microsoft, starts looking for an ally.

The software creators target different market segment. Some industries are typically creating software only for technical people while others are creating software forever growing number of general consumer. Then there are breed of software creators interested in creating software’s for creating software.

This is the time for open source emergence especially in operating systems part. Mainly because open source operating systems like Linux are already present in the market. The boom also helps creation and spread of more open source software.

2010-2015
Although the growing interest among consumers for customization is helping the creation on new generation of software, the existing heavy weights are trying to oppose such a move, especially in case of operating system. Microsoft more because it would affect its business and market share and service software manufacturer because of the different versions of same software they have to create.

Yet with change in general business model to more customer oriented, software providers are forced to manufacture different types of software to meet the demand and capture the market share before other competitors. Every company now fights to become the major player after Microsoft has lost some of its market share. This further intensifies competition in the industry. The software industry now becomes more fragmented with lots of small companies sprouting up to fill in the niches. Web becomes the medium of communication and major source of innovation in the software industry. The new tech savvy firms starts looking for markets like further intensifying the creation of user content based services and software.

Government looking at the growth in economy created by the technological advancement boosts its support for innovation and open source software creation.

This becomes the era of high technological innovation and advancement. This boost creation and coexistence of different types of software creation methods like, Open source, closed source, hybrid, self-creating, etc. Companies now fight for standardization.