There’s been plenty of technology wars in the software industry. Here’s a list of those that I got to witness in the past 25 years.
- Methodologies: in the 90s there was a new software project management methodology every 10 days. Scrum (Agile in general) won.
- Web browsers: First there was Netscape from 1993 to 1997, and then Internet Explorer took over the chrown for almost 15 years. Since then it’s Chrome all over the way, and even Microsoft ditched all efforts to compete in that market. Chrome won.
- Source Code Management: I’ve talked about this already, and Git won. If you don’t know what Git is, this might help.
- Text Editors: TextEdit, UltraEdit, or Notepad++? Vim or Emacs? Joe or Nano? TextMate or Sublime Text? I’ve also written about this. Never mind, Visual Studio Code won.
- Spreadsheets: Lotus 123, Borland Quattro Pro, Lotus Improv remember? Bah, Excel won.
- Word processors: again. Remember WordPress, WordStar, Ami Pro, StarOffice / OpenOffice / LibreOffice? Word won.
- Operating systems: Windows won. At least on the desktop. One of those things that define big software companies.
- Container orchestration systems: Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm were really short lived. Kubernetes won. Again, if you don’t know what it is, you’re welcome.
- Smartphones: iOS and Android killed BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, but then again Android won with the numbers.
- Programming languages: That’s a hard one; COBOL won but then PL/I won and then Pascal won but C++ won and then Smalltalk could have won but Java won the enterprise and then Ruby won the Web 2.0 and then Python won the Machine Learning. Well, according to Atwood’s Law, JavaScript won.
- Web servers: NGINX won. Because, seriously, Apache running on a container? Please.
- Relational Databases: Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL… bah, PostgreSQL won. It is too good to be true. Even though SQLite is also quite a winner.
There were the DEC Wars too, and even the Unix Wars, but those are different things.