摘要：The computer and software industries ushered in a revolutionary economic era. Whereas major conventional markets — from automo-biles to conventional appliances, raw materials, food, and consumer products — have thrived on competition among many suppliers, com-puter hardware and software markets tended toward one or a few dominant players for a distinctive reason: consumers, programmers, and system users care about network effects. They want to communi-cate among devices and among software products running on their devices. They care about interoperability — among hardware devices, between software and hardware devices, and across software. They value the investment that they have made in learning software inter-faces. Once consumer or programmer bandwagons take hold, markets tip decisively toward an emerging dominant platform.
