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ie8 fix

duopoly

Firefox beats IE in Europe: A duopoly to come?

Mozilla's Firefox 3 is now Europe's dominant Web browser with 35.05 percent market share, beating out Internet Explorer 7's 34.54 percent share, according to data released by StatCounter and reported by Reuters.

Is this a sign of good things to come for open source? Or is it an indication that we're rapidly nearing an industry-wide duopoly: Microsoft and open source, with everything and everyone else an afterthought?

We still have a ways to go before open-source competitors in ERP, CRM, ECM, middleware, databases, operating systems, and other product segments attain Firefox's dominant share, … Read more

All the tech world's a duopoly, but how do Microsoft and open source fit?

I really like Larry Dignan's posts on ZDNet, and his post Tuesday on the natural state of software markets (duopoly) is probably accurate, though I wish it weren't so. Customers lose in many ways when industries consolidate. Having said that, it's also nice to not have to contemplate a blizzard of choices when you just want to know whether to wear brown shoes or black shoes on a given day.

Regardless of whether it's good or not, Larry identifies a slew of software (and hardware) markets that have been "duopolized." From among many:

Enterprise software: SAP and Oracle. Sure, HP and IBM are rapidly beefing up their software units. But once that dance of music chairs ends, a midlevel software company can take comfort (or not) in the belief that it'll be a subsidiary of Oracle someday.

Maybe. Or could there be an open-source pretender to this duopoly throne? And where is Microsoft in Larry's two-seated enterprise throne?… Read more