What Is Tech's Top Rivalry?

Once upon a time, rivalries really mattered in the tech industry—far more than they do now. Maybe the industry’s behavior has simply matured along with the underlying economics. Growth rates for most segments have slowed, leaving less reason for rivals to do their best trash-talking and evangelista-ing, as they did when the sky seemed to be the limit. (I’m thinking of Dell vs Compaq and IBM, or Microsoft versus IBM or Sun or Netscape).

Or maybe it’s that so many of today’s faster growing markets have yet to prove they can be profitable, such as social networking. Hard to pull out all the marketing stops when there’s nothing but red ink on that bottom line. Or maybe it’s an end-of-history kind of thing—that most of the big fights that really matter have already been decided. Microsoft seems to have survived the threat from Linux in servers, and all but killed off Unix. The Internet Protocol has whooped every other network. Amazon has vanquished eBay.