Here in this post, I will talk about my most simplistic interpretation and analysis how IT industry went through revolution about 20 years back, and how it is going through another one now! While the first of these revolutions was a sea change and re-scripted the paradigms for most of us, the second one, that we are witnessing now, is much more, because the world is literally exploding with information. After this explosion, world will be a very small place to live in.
The first of these revolutions was led was Microsoft. For long, Microsoft had remained the singleton and ultimate authority of the IT industry. The company changed the way the world works, when it introduced the PC. Year after year, it invented newer technologies, all of which touched our lives in ways beyond what most of us imagined. Microsoft started it all with the most simplistic DOS operating system for computers. The next contribution from the company was its enormously popular Windows system, several versions of which power many millions of computers worldwide today. Even if I argue that Windows is single-handedly responsible for the revolution, it won't be too much of an exaggeration. There are so many other aspects to the revolution, which are all not being discussed here.
So, all this and more contributed to Microsoft retained as the unquestionable for almost a decade - most part of the 80s and the first few years of the 90s. But, the 90's brought along with it, the internet revolution. The internet was looked upon as just a medium of communication in the beginning. It was not entirely untrue, because the internet was born because of the need to reduce the many hassles of communication. That it was the starter for the second IT revolution was not understood by many, including Microsoft. But, some did. Without going to too much of the inside stories, let me straight come to the point. However, some of these are quite important pieces of the great jigsaw, that created (it still does) the second IT revolution, that can't be skipped. The most important among these were the open source community. When the leaders and and those amazing visionary advocates of this community initially started off with the idea, nobody could've ever imagined that it actually are baby-steps to a revolution. While the actual revolution is brought about by the likes of Google and so on, the ever-expanding community of open source is the framework, the very thread of it. There are several, who contributed to the growth of internet and millions reaped benefits from it. The most striking example of the contributions by the open source community is Linux, the free operating system born off the spark ignited by a young researcher during the mid 90's and supported by hundreds of those like-minded developers. Microsoft was literally shaken by this development, but of course a giant like Microsoft was too much for Linux to conquer by itself. It didn't have to wait for long, before another spark was born at the
I will cover the rest of this article in my next post...
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