5. IBM verses the regulators
Iain Thomson: In the early computer industry the phrase "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" was commonplace.
IBM dominated the computer industry for the first twenty years of its life. It built computers that aided the Holocaust for Nazi Germany but when the US belatedly entered the Second World War it turned its efforts to the sides of the democracies and built an admiral reputation while refusing to take more than one per cent profit from war work.
But it held certain patents that held the rest of the industry back. The ground-breaking case of Honeywell v. Sperry Rand spelled IBM's loss of control of the industry, invalidating patents that the company and its proxies had used to exercise a deadening control over the computer market.
The resultant boom in computing technology sprung from this verdict. Less than five years later the first personal computer came out, and the rest is history.
Shaun Nichols: Many in the business world like to say that regulation harms innovation, that when an industry is controlled by the government nobody wants to do anything new. In the case of IBM, however, a solid argument was made for the ways in which government intervention can spark growth within the industry.
This becomes even more important when you take into account IBM's opinions on the market at the time. The company was a firm believer in the idea of a single, centralised computer system and had little interest personal workstations. Even when PC technology did become viable, years later, there's some doubt that IBM would want to enter a market with such low margins.
By breaking up IBM's operation and freeing these patents, the US government helped to prepare the market for the computing booms that would take place in the 1970s and 80s. It also helped to set precedent for future antitrust cases in the IT world, such as those against AT&T and Microsoft.
4.Salesforce v Seibel
Shaun Nichols: In 1999 a company called Saleforce.com went life with a web-based customer relationship management (CRM) tool that ran through the web browser. The new service allowed smaller companies to purchase the product one user at a time, and pay a monthly subscription cost rather than buy the entire package up front.
Siebel systems laughed off the plucky startup. After all, Siebel sold its product in huge deployments that cost tens of thousands of dollars. The company's clients were large enterprises that weren't likely to switch any time soon.
Dismissing the idea turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes made by a software vendor in recent memory. The software as a service (SaaS) and individual subscription model proved to be a huge success, and Siebel soon saw its market shrinking as Salesforce moved into the larger enterprise sector.
Too small to take on market leader SAP and too rigid and inflexible to ward off Salesforce, Siebel eventually was bought out by Oracle as its once tiny rival gained huge chunks in the market.
Iain Thomson: Saleforce.com is a great example of two things: someone having a good idea and the rest of the market being too stupid to realise this.
Salesforce took the industry on with one of the first SaaS servings and wiped the floor with the competition. You can almost see the look of shock on the faces of Siebel executives as they sat down to another executive lunch and found the market had been stolen out from under them.
But this wasn't really a fight - it was more of a French army circa 1940 situation. The established vendors didn't really understand the competing technology and before they knew it they'd been blitzkrieged into submission. W
3. Commodore verses everyone else
Iain Thomson: Commodore was born from a combative past. It was originally a calculator company but was forced out of the market by Texas Instruments who started selling calculators at less than the cost of production to win market share.
This was one of the factors that led Commodore into the personal computer market, and also (I suspect) a major factor in it nearly destroying it.
The company's PET and VIC-20 broke records in personal computer take-up and the Commodore 64 was a masterpiece of engineering. I remember using one in 1991 and being amazed how this 'old' computer could handle such great graphics and processing. It really was a model ahead of its time.
But then the urge to dominate seized the Commodore board. The company had a commanding position in the industry but Apple and then IBM came into the PC market and the Commodore management decided on a scorched earth strategy.
Commodore would take on every other vendor, drive them out of business and reap the profits.
At first the strategy of slashing prices appeared to work. Texas Instruments was driven out of the market, Atari was crippled and a whole generation of programmers found themselves out of a job. The computing industry faced its first ever recession.
But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Commodore destroyed the village in order to save it and reaped the whirlwind. The company is now an also-ran in computing history and will soon be forgotten.
Shaun Nichols: Today, many gamers and PC enthusiasts regard Commodore with an attitude of nostalgia and retro cool. The Commodore 64 has a soft spot in the hearts of many for the role it played in the home computing and gaming market of the 1980s. If they were to delve a little deeper into Commodore 's actions in those years, however, those same users may become quite angry with the company.
As the advent of video gaming began to push computers into the home in the early 1980s, a bevy of new companies were founded to produce both the hardware and software for low-cost home systems. Some were better than others, but it cannot be disputed that the market was quite competitive and receptive to innovation.
Commodore founder and president Jack Tramiel did not like the idea of having to share the market with so many other firms, so he decided to price his competitors out of business and absorb a near-term loss for long-term gains in market share. It was a war of attrition that Commodore would ultimately win, though at a crippling cost to the company.
Home video game companies were almost entirely wiped out, and by time the crash had subsided, the cash-strapped Commodore was too weak to take advantage of the market. Windows and Macintosh PCs drove the company out of the computer market, while a home gaming device from a Japanese firm named "Nintendo" took care of the console market.
2. Intel verses AMD
Iain Thomson: I'm going to have to be very careful what I write here because there is an ongoing anti-competitive case going on in the EU and US at the moment on just this issue.
Intel was the first modern chip company. Born out of an alliance of interested parties at Fairchild Semiconductors, Intel has gone on to be the biggest chip company in the world and has an annual turnover larger than several small countries.
AMD was also started by refugees from Fairchild and initially worked quite well with Intel. Indeed, it could be said that Intel's success with IBM was due to competition with AMD, since IBM was required to have two chip suppliers.
But then in 1986 Intel started to play rough and cut off support for AMD by denying it access to the chip designs it needed. After eight year in the courts Intel had to pay damages, but the ill feeling persists to this day. Intel has fired more legal challenges at AMD, most of which have been beaten off at huge expense. Now AMD is fighting back.
AMD has over the last years been preparing its revenge. Over the last decade the company has been significantly ahead of Intel in the technology sphere, yet this hasn't translated into orders. AMD, by all accounts, feels this is because Intel has had agreements with OEMs to ignore AMD's processors in favour of Intel's, in return for large discounts on volume chip supplies.
It's up to the courts to see if these claims are true. What is clear is that both the EU and the US, as well as Japan and Korea, are taking this seriously and in some cases have come down on AMD's side.
The current round of investigations will take years to complete and, if Microsoft's experience with the EU is anything to go by, will take years more of appeals and the resultant fines won't hurt too much - since that would stifle the 'free market'.
Shaun Nichols: Depending on who you ask, the spat between Intel and AMD these days is either the result of dirty tricks or sour grapes. AMD claims that Intel bribed and threatened PC and server vendors to go with its own chips, while Intel claims that AMD is just upset because it simply could not keep up in key areas of processor development.
Regardless of the claims being made today, the war between Intel and AMD paid huge dividends to consumers. When Intel saw its development stall, AMD was there to take advantage and the market responded. This in turn pushed Intel to step up its own game. Over the last two decades, both companies have been what some analysts liken to a game of leapfrog in which each company briefly jumps ahead of its rival.
These days Intel is ahead in the market and AMD is still dogged by financial problems. Hopefully the company can recover, because the back-and-forth between the two sides has been a boon to the rest of the industry.
1. Microsoft v. Netscape
Shaun Nichols: Perhaps the most influential event of the last decade was Microsoft's landmark anti-trust case. Fallout from the case shook up the entire market and forced the largest software vendor in the world to radically alter its approach to the market. And it all started with one showdown.
In the late 1990s the internet was coming of age. As users ventured out of the walled-garden ISP experience and into the larger internet, the web browser market boomed and Netscape was the reigning king.
Seeing this boom in browsing, Microsoft wanted to get some of the pie. Having already accumulated a dominant position in the operating system world and a huge software applications outfit, Microsoft decided that rather than compete head-to-head, it would simply leverage Windows.
While Netscape was a paid application that had to purchased in a store or downloaded online, Microsoft decided to bundle its Internet Explorer application as a free component of Windows. Not only did users not have to obtain and install a separate browser, they could get it for free.
As one would expect, users flocked to Internet Explorer and Netscape was devastated. The company soon had to shut down, but not before filing what would become a landmark lawsuit. As the case dragged on, authorities realised that Microsoft was using the dominance of Windows to muscle other companies out of the market.
Netscape may not have won the browser war, but they planted the seed that lead to disaster for their rival. Ironically, Microsoft later found itself battling for browser supremacy when the remnants of Netscape Navigator were turned over to the open source world and used as the foundation for Mozilla Firefox.
Iain Thomson: I think you're overestimating Microsoft here Shaun. Gates wrote off the internet in 1993 as the computer equivalent of CB radio, then tried to catch up fast.
In doing so I think Gates panicked. He saw he'd missed the boat on the biggest thing in computing so used Internet Explorer to not only do over Netscape but to try and lock everyone using Windows into using IE. I was at a meeting with Microsoft public relations where the intention was clearly stated - "We need to [censored] Netscape until they bleed."
This was not a comment from a company in control of the situation.
Once Microsoft dominated the browser market development stopped until Mozilla used the Netscape engine to build a better browser and Microsoft was forced to play catchup again. We lost nearly a decade of browser development because Redmond got its monopoly.
Ultimately Microsoft paid heavily for the price of winning the browser wars. While getting off lightly in the US under Bush's regime the EU stepped up and did its job. Microsoft is still paying the price for its actions
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