What is making enterprise innovation possible

FORTUNE -- Grabbing market share through muscle, not innovation, has served Microsoft and other leading enterprise behemoths well: they play in a $250 billion-plus industry that asymmetrically favors a few vendors. But not surprisingly, this model has not been particularly effective in producing technology breakthroughs -- rather, it has stifled innovation within incumbents' organizations, as well as the broader industry by making the barrier to entry impossibly high. And it has certainly hasn't served customers well. For decades, they've dealt with complicated integrations, infrastructure that's too hard to maintain, overwhelmingly expensive technology, and services and support that overpower the price of the original system by a factor of five to ten.

Fortunately for customers and emerging vendors, this reign of the enterprise oligarchy is coming to an end. In 1995, a pre-comeback Steve Jobs claimed that the Internet was exciting "because Microsoft (MSFT) doesn't own it and I don't think they can." While this level of democratization came to consumer landscape first -- with Google (GOOG), Facebook, Amazon (AMZN), and other leaders emerging in the past decade because of the web's openness -- it's now made its way into the enterprise, according to a report in CNNMoney.

The democratic, "un-ownable" nature of the Internet is playing out in full force as organizations transition to the cloud, and the legacy players' very strengths are fast becoming their weaknesses. The needs of corporations have finally outstripped the power and capabilities of most of the technology they have, and traditional vendors have been too slow to respond. We're moving into a new world, one where markets aren't won by customer lock-in, but rather through speed, relentless innovation, and above all, openness.  >>More here

SOURCE:  tech.fortune.cnn.com