Some of these companies were dominant until relatively late: WordPerfect was the market leader in word processing in 1995, when it had 50 per cent market share. But once Microsoft had established dominance in the operating system market, it became increasingly hard to take on. There was a powerful network effect: once everybody else was using Windows, and exchanging Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, it became much easier for you to use them too. The network effect driving Microsoft’s success allowed it to spread inexorably from one market area to the next – first operating systems, then
...more
