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

Ah, the ubiquitous PC and its Windows desktop. There is still a lively controversy over which operating system is best, but there is no doubting who controls the most desktops. The IBM PC, with its Windows graphic user interface, took the business work by storm. Many people give some of the credit for this to the spreadsheet program Visicalc, though it appeared first on the Apple, then spread quickly to other platforms, including the PC. I first used it on a Radio Shack TRS-80, alongside a word processing program called Electric Pencil.

With the popularity of the PC and Windows, and with business-style software beginning to take hold, the world of business was changed forever. Almost as quickly as they could be manufactured, businesses snapped up PCs with Windows. Just as quickly, entrepreneurs saw the possibility of making money writing business software for the popular platform. This kicked off the biggest boom that business software had ever known, and that boom is still going on today.

Some of that business software took the form of connectivity utilities to connect the PC to mainframes and minis as smart terminals. But more and more, as years went by, the majority of business software was written to run on individual PCs or on PC-style servers running in PC networks. This gave rise to the great (and some not-so-great) database back-ends, corporate accounting software, Office Suites, email clients, productivity utilities, and all of the other parts of the huge puzzle that is PC-based business software today.

Like mainframes, a lot of early PC-based business software was intended for larger companies, but soon was trickling down to smaller companies as the prices of both hardware and software tumbled. It was not long before a home-based business could easily afford the necessary hardware and software to operate their companies. I ran my first PC-based business in 1978, long before Windows. I was an early adopter.

The software that the vast majority of us see, we see because we have a PC running Windows on our desk. There are some cross-platform business applications, of course, but fewer than you would probably think. On the backend, networks are built so that people from all of the popular platforms can get data our of databases, or put data into databases, and communicate with the rest of the company and the planet.

All of that said, most business desktop software runs on the PC / Windows platform. That was the target that most application developers have always had in mind, because it was the market with the most systems and therefore the greater chance for a larger number of sales. They sometimes migrated later to other platforms, if they ever did that at all. The exceptions are almost all Apple-compatible software that migrated to the PC. Recently, some truly cross-platform business applications have been written as a part of the Open Source movement.

The seeming stranglehold of the Windows has begun to show cracks in the armor lately. These are primarily due to the lack of acceptance of Windows Vista (6) by business and personal users alike. It is the only operating system that I have ever seen that offers an option to go back to the previous version. Apple has gained some market share, Linux has gained some market share, and Microsoft has gained a lot more enemies. There is every chance, if they don’t respond well to the Vista fiasco, Microsoft may be on the way out of the operating system business.

Tomorrow, Apple.