[devjab]

Techs often maintain their position because of their spread which causes a self-sustaining environment . In my region of the world C# was very popular in the early 00’s and most companies who used it then still use it today. As a result the local job-market is pretty C# heavy, with around 30-40% of developer jobs involving working with dotnet. I’m not sure any newer organisations have gone that way, Python/Go/TypeScript has seen a huge increase, but it’s not like C# won’t be around for another few decades (especially if it continues being good). I think Git maintains its monopoly in a similar fashion, but on a much larger scale where basically the entire “western” world uses it. With places like GitHub that monopoly is only strengthen as other mention.

How it got there is a different story. I’m old enough to have been around the Danish CS scene back when computer clusters were just an experimental thing at universities and when CVS arrived around the millennium. While it was mind blowing for its time, it was also terrible to work with. Similarly subversion wasn’t very nice (for many people) and it’s likely because the centralised model just isn’t very work friendly for a lot of organisations. Then came Git, which wasn’t the first decentralised version control, I believe Microsoft came first with their hellish team foundation which proved that distributed systems aren’t good by default. Anyway, at the time Git was such a breath of fresh air in how great it was to use. It was both easy and productive and it held such an increase in quality of life that it was a no brainier to transition to git for most organisations. At least the ones which didn’t have expensive team foundation or subversion contracts.

Which birthed the circle or dominance that might never get broken. I doubt any of the old players will in any case. If they were capable of building great version control they would’ve done so from the start, and since Gits only major problem is its multitude of options it’s hard to imagine that Subcersion would ever cut 90% of their features. Team Foundation mostly trundles along because some organisations still haven’t given up on their licenses (which is the reason a lot of Microsoft things exists), but with Microsoft owning GitHub it’s not likely that they want to do anything other than to keep it good enough to keep that revenue.