As bleak as the technology sector looks, there's one bright spot: The Microsoft monopoly is dead.
Perhaps "dead" is too strong a term. Statistically, Microsoft still rules — on the PC desktop, at least.
But monopolies, which take years to build, collapse slowly. And historians seldom point toward market share as the meaningful indicator of a monopoly's demise.
The most famous example is IBM. Big Blue's loss of monopoly status did not really sink in until the early 1990s. Yet technology watchers typically point to the release of the IBM PC in 1981 — with a nonexclusive operating system from a tiny company called Microsoft — as the leak that eventually brought down the IBM dike.
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