Silicon Chips Falling Where They May
Things move quickly in the software business; well, sometimes they do. And sometimes, howsoever fast or slow, there are surprises. The outcome in the antitrust suit over Oracle vs. PeopleSoft is one. Mostly, when one software company swallows up another, the biggest effect is on the employees, rather than the customers, but if Oracle is successful, existing PeopleSoft customers are going to see some changes sooner rather than later, and they’re going to be big ones. Even more significant is the message the judge’s decision sends to other large software companies, including Microsoft. It may seem at first like niche applications, but Oracle and PeopleSoft and SAP are the big players (at the moment) in payroll and human resources ERP. Everybody else is serving a much different market. Microsoft’s been looking for a way into this market, and while I don’t see them buying up SAP anytime soon, the way has been cleared somewhat for them to improve their position through takeovers, despite prior decisions regarding their status as a monopoly. Sure, that’s in operating systems, but their argument has often relied upon application bundling, so if they could integrate a large-scale payroll database into Windows, well, that would change everything. Windows got where it is via DOS and an early IBM relationship, which translated into market dominance for Word and Excel. Explorer rode along, and that’s worked out well for Bill Gates, too. If some high-end business software could be effectively bundled in, there would be little room for anyone else. Maybe that’s why PeopleSoft has fought so hard against the takeover. Their more recent releases have made extensive use of IE compatibility, so maybe they’d have preferred getting in bed with the 600-pound gorilla. No matter; as an friend of mine used to say, it’s all going to end up one big company anyway, and it’ll be Time Warner. Well, maybe Sony-Time Warner.