OPEN SYSTEMS

Intel’s microprocessors and Microsoft’s MS-DOS and Windows programs have become de facto standards because their sales dominate the personal computer market. However, they are still owned by Intel and Microsoft, which gives these companies an advantage. There is an alternative, the open-systems approach, in which standards are specified independently of particular manufacturers by industry committees. Suppliers compete by trying to produce the best implementation of an agreed standard. In theory, this should lead to better products at lower prices. It is certainly less risky for manufacturers to support an agreed standard than for each company to develop a different proprietary system: probably only one or two such systems would be successful, and the rest would fail. For this reason, computer industry suppliers invest a great deal of time and energy in efforts to agree standards. Companies will even “give away” their technologies to recognized industry bodies to encourage their adoption as standards.
In the mid-1980s several European companies, encouraged by the European Commission (see European Union: European Commission), began to agree open-systems standards for computers, and they were soon joined by the leading American and Japanese suppliers. These standards were based on a portable (not machine-specific) operating specification called Posix, which was ultimately derived from AT&T’s UNIX operating system, and on Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking, as ratified by the International Standards Organization. Following a Commission directive, many governments mandated public bodies to buy open-systems computers whenever possible, and the United States government and some others took similar actions. Leading manufacturers such as IBM, Digital Equipment, and the largest British computer company at the time, ICL, changed their proprietary operating systems and networks to comply with the required standards.
However, the open-systems approach was not successful in capturing the mass market, and the effort exposed several problems with it. Because the specifications had to satisfy many participants in the standards-making process, they often proved to be complex and expensive to implement. Some standards provided too many options, or allowed different interpretations, so that even when different firms implemented the same standards, their systems remained incompatible. The standards-setting process often proved to be too slow for the fast-moving computer market.
As a result, computer industry suppliers now participate in numerous shifting alliances formed around various technologies. These alliances constantly generate publicity in an attempt to sway the market, producing an often spurious impression that the computer industry is continually at war with itself.
Since 1994 the Internet has had an increasing influence on the development of the computer industry. Most suppliers have now adopted Internet standards that have been developed in universities and research institutes over the past 25 years. In particular, the Internet’s method of connecting computers, which is called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), has largely displaced commercial alternatives produced by companies such as IBM and Novell, Inc., as well as the open-systems standard, OSI.
In the beginning, the computer industry was dominated by large, proprietary, centralized systems. Later, mass market economies of scale made cheap personal computer technologies dominant. Today, the Internet is connecting both large and small systems together in a more balanced network that encourages approaches such as distributed computing, peer-to-peer file sharing, and the use of open standards to provide Web-based services.