Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

Businesses today still run their major processes on the back room. Some of those processes run on mainframes, and still a few mini-computers. Many companies run the back room on PC-based servers. To the normal business user, which is to say the internal consumer of the data generated by the employer, the connection to that data is from the desktop of a workstation closely allied to the personal computer. It is that desktop, and operating system which displays it, around which much of the battle for business software supremacy revolves.

There are amazingly few options for how that desktop works. The options revolve tightly around the choice of operating systems; business software options very often (but not always) depend on the OS choice.  Ever since the business desktop computer began to solidify around the first IBM PC and Microsoft Windows, not much has changed until fairly recently. This was the combination that made doing business with PCs possible. After years of anarchy in personal computers, the PC and Windows began to standardize the hardware, the operating system, and the application with which business would be done. We owe Bill gates that much thanks.

The office worker comes in every morning and boots their PC clone into Windows. The vast majority of white-collar employees have been doing that since approximately 1987, more than twenty years ago, when Windows 2.xxx began to take hold. The Intel-based workstation, running Windows, captured the vast majority of the business marketplace and has had a virtual stranglehold on it for all of those years, a death-grip that has only recently begun to loosen.

The next most popular choice over all those years has been Apple. Although fashionable with artists and designers, Apple has historically held a very small market share. The Mac has always cost more. Worse, Apple decided long ago to closely hold all of their hardware and software secrets, becoming the heir to the IBM model of the sixties and seventies. That model nearly killed IBM, and did kill DEC. Very recently, severe problems with Windows Vista and the adoption of Intel (PC) hardware by Apple, along with a *nix operating system, have helped the Mac grow it’s market share.

Business workstations running Linux are a more recent innovation. Linux is the choice for most of the PC-based servers that power the World Wide Web and many private business servers. The adoption of Linux for the desktop has been slower, perhaps mainly because of a lack of user-friendliness of the system. That, too, has begun to change for the better in recent years, and may signal the readiness of Linux to become a business desktop contender.

Over the next few days, we will take a look at each of these desktop systems and consider what impact recent changes are likely to have on the entire business software marketplace.