Organized for Cycles of Change

The author discusses the following questions about the IT market: Why is the commercial IT market organized unlike other markets? That is more challenging to answer than you would think. The IT market seems to change more quickly than other industries, and it seems to use frontier technologies more often. Neither trait is unique to IT, however, financial markets change quickly. Biotech uses frontier technology. Why does the presence and combination of quick change and frontier technology seem so special to the organization of IT markets? Here is a related puzzle. Over the last five decades, many parts of computing and networking have become compartmentalized into submarkets. Specialists inhabit each category and sometimes work with specialists in other categories, and sometimes not. Sometimes a single firm works in many of those submarkets, and sometimes many independent entrepreneurs do. While compartmentalization itself is not unique to IT - the automobile supply chain possess similar features, for example - the IT market witnesses frequent rearrangement of those categories, and the leading firms therein. Sometimes it is orderly and sometimes not. How did it get to be that way? The combination of technical interdependence and technical improvement in fundamental components results in frequent restructuring and mismatches. Difficult to manage, and always entertaining to watch, no other market behaves this way. Two decades ago all the energy went into adjudicating potential abuses of leadership at Microsoft and Intel. Two decades earlier it was IBM. These days the focus stares at Alphabet/Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. That kind of rapid turnover in leadership happens in no other market.