Operating System Industry in 1994
1. What was the Structure of OS industry in 1994 and who were the major players?
The Operating System industry has four major segments; desktop, network mainframe, minicomputer and specialized niche OS. Within the desktop industry, at lower end, MS-DOS and Windows compete with IBM’s OS / 2, Apple’s Mac System 7 and Novell’s DR-DOS. In this segment Microsoft dominates with about 75% of nearly 24 million units shipped in 1993. At high end, i.e. at workstations, UNIX dominates with different fragments of IBM’s AIX, HP’s HP-UX, and Sun’s Solaris. Within the network segment, Novell’s Netware product is dominant among the competitors; IBM’s LAN server and Microsoft’s LAN Manager and NT advanced Server products. This segment is seeing rapid growth due to increase in client-server networks.
2. What are the technological and market dynamics in the OS industry and what are the anticipated changes in structure for future rivalry?
Key technological trends:
· The shift to 32-bit and 64-bit OS which is, partly driven by the availability of 32-bit CISC an RISC microprocessors. Several RISC architectures are challenging Intel’s x86 architecture
· The shift to a distributed computing environment that consists of heterogeneous systems from the multiple vendors network together in client-server and peer-to-peer models
· The use of object-oriented technology in software development which enables the reuse of modules of code that can be easily combined to form new applications. Since 1994, this new technology in widely used to lead orders of magnitude improvement in programming time.
Key market trends:
- Corporate customers demand new OS to improve the ability to crease timely and cost-efficient solutions.
- Demand for customized application is increased which require new OS and tools
Key implications for future course:
· Third party support would be critical to a platform’s success. Thus vendor must focus on building relationships with key resellers, VARs, SIs, and ISVs
- Competitors must adapt integrated strategies to compete with Microsoft and establish their application programming models as standards in the industry.
- Three important product suites will serve as alternatives to Microsoft products in market; client desktop, Server/network operating system and Object-based APIs
3. Which players represent the most important competitive threats to Microsoft in 1994?
IBM, Apple, NeXT and UNIX vendors can be a competitive threat to Microsoft in 1994
4. As CEO of Microsoft, taking in to account the strategies that your major rivals are likely to pursue, what steps can you take?
Microsoft should develop a technology and competitive strategy that will allow it to maintain its dominance in OS industry.
- For windows 3.1, Microsoft should continue to motivate end-users to move from MS-DOS to Windows 3.1
- Launch
- Should positioned Windows NT as a high end product to Windows 3.1
- The Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) 2.0 needs to be simplified
- To focus more on Cairo, which is next version of Windows NT.
