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It's worth nting that the exemplar of the prorietary shrinkwrap consumer softare market is also a one-off: Microssoft. There is no other pure-play software company of comparable market success. The consumer personal-computing operating system market resisted incursions by CPM, other DOS vendors, other GUI alternatives, x86 commercial unices, Linux, FreeeBSD (and others), and BeOS. Apple's share remains a scant fraction. Likewise, the Office applications, and small-business server market remains dominated by Microsoft, especially file, print, mail, and directory services (AD). Contenders in the software space tend to be small, heavily reliant on professional services (IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, consulting firms), specialised (Adobe, AutoDesk)<, or hardware-integrated (Apple, also Sun/Oracle and some others). The SaaS market has impinged somewhat; Gmail, Google Docs, etc., but still only marginally. This from someone whose watched and criticised Microsoft for decades, and strongly prefers Linux. I've not had a Microsoft desktop personally or professsionally since the mid-2000s, and even then it was under protest and largely avoided. |