The fall of Rome, the plateu of Microsoft, and the rise of Apple.

As history has demonstrated, nothing lasts forever. New ideals replace the old, and if you aren't flexible enough to adapt you'll be put out to pasture, no matter what type of empire you've built up. It would seem that we are at a major evolutionary point in the IT industry. Yes, you might say the IT industry is always changing, which it is, but the changes occurring now are more much clearer than previous changes. Even though the changes we are seeing now are rapid and radical, lots of them been quite predictable. 10 years ago if you were to take a guess at where we'd be now it would be pretty clear that mobile computing would be that status quo, and here we are. Yet despite this predictability Microsoft has failed to keep up with the times. They are the undisputed leader in desktop computing, but in terms of online platforms or mobile, they have fallen far behind. Not because their products are sub-par. On the contrary. Bing, Zune.... these are highly acclaimed technologies that they offer, but they are both years too late. Years too late in the tech industry doesn't cut it. As great as those products are people's thirst for personal, mobile, connected computing is being quenched by the likes of Apple (iPhone), (who a little more than a decade ago was on their death bed), Google (Android), Rim (Blackberry), and many many many miscellaneous mobile platforms. So what went wrong with Microsoft? Try as they may, their vision of mobile computer never caught on. Pocket PC's remained a niche market for technology enthusiasts and the first generation of tablet pc's didn't quite cut it with the masses. Both technologies were a little to soon, a little too clunky, and a little too uncool.
Apple on the other hand, waited until the fruit was ripe for the picking. The PC market had grown stale, and users were bored with their plane-jane cell phones and desktop pc's. Even if the iPhone wasn't a perfect product right out of the gate, its what people needed. It was fast, cool looking, and easy to use. It was design from the ground up for mobile computing. It wasn't Windows stuffed into a little device. Also, it appealed to the masses. It didn't have a watered down version of MS Office like it's windows CE predecessors, but who wants that anyways? Only 0.5% of the human population want a dummied version of excel, but everyone and their dog wants to be tweeting and connecting through facebook on a sleek, light-weight smart phone. That with the power of the app-store is where Apple hit the nail on the head. Microsoft might of dominated the pc world, but Apple is dominating all the other consumer level hardware form factors. So what does this mean? Well, 10 years ago, anyone with an interest in technology could of told you that mobile was the big thing. Everyone saw it coming. But what is the next big thing now? Well I guess we'll have to wait and see, but if we can learn anything from history, it's that it probably won't be from Microsoft or Apple, but some other smaller company that with skill, vigilance and a little luck will IT into a new era.

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