Despite cynical theories of slowdown, the Big 4 software giants’ growth is rocket-fuelled by cloud migrations, as their recent quarterly reports show. But could the looming “service software” AI tsunami threaten the very business they are trying to sustain?
Credit: Bhawani Shankar
Sometimes enemies can be lifesavers. The $150m loan from Microsoft that rescued Apple from bankruptcy in 1997, for instance, is now the most widely read chapter of software folklore. Microsoft was under threat in the antitrust case and needed to show it wasn’t a greedy monopoly and that Apple was a credible rival; Apple, on the other hand, needed a lifeline — and cash — to survive. The rest may well be history but the question that begs asking is if the massive push into cloud migration will lead software giants like SAP and Oracle into relative obscurity.
Gates and Jobs did it with their eyes wide open. Today’s software behemoths, …