Coming Software Shakeout
Strategy+Business writes:
In a couple of years, the enterprise software industry may very well be unrecognizable.
Blame it primarily on consolidation. Five years ago, 11 companies controlled 90 percent of the database market; now only six do. In business applications, the trend is even more pronounced: Seventy percent of the market is now controlled by just 35 companies, compared with more than 120 companies in 2000. Such high-profile deals as Oracle’s recent acquisitions of Siebel and PeopleSoft have left only two vendors to choose from, Oracle and SAP, for top-tier integrated suites.
Orkut in Brazil
The New York Times discusses Orkut's phenomenal success in Brazil. [Orkut is Google's social networking site.]
About 11 million of Orkut's more than 15 million users are registered as living in Brazil — a remarkable figure given that studies have estimated that only about 12 million Brazilians use the Internet from home.
...
No one quite knows why Orkut caught on among Brazilians and not Americans, although the fact that it is an invitation-only network might explain why it exploded in Brazil. In a 2005 interview with the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, Mr. Buyukkokten said it might be because Brazilians were "a friendly people," and perhaps because some of his own friends, among the first to join the network, had Brazilian friends.
Yeah... correct, but in fact it's the same with all kinds of software. There are only a few powerful software companies which develope nearly every famous application, like Microsoft, SAP etc.
Posted by Kylie M. Lee