Last night, a freak accident occurred which temporarily broke the causality of the Internet and gave me access to Wikipedia entries from 2019. The effect did not last for more than a minute, but here's a direct cut-and-paste from what I managed to glimpse from the future. I looked at the three articles which were most interesting to me:
Digital Rights Management (DRM) was a brief and unsuccessful attempt by the now-defunct "recording industry" to maintain an old business model in the face of game-changing technology for the creation, distribution, archival and playback of audio and video. Many unsuccessful schemes for "copy protection" were devised, all based on the unrealistic assumption that digital copying could and should be restricted and controlled. Years of unsuccessful legal processes against individuals accused of "illegal file sharing" effectively alienated the industry with its customers, and after DRM was finally put to rest, any attempts at saving face proved fruitless. By then, customers had moved on to new market actors who had embraced the new technology and created new business models to work with technology instead of against it.
Software patents were a brief and strange historic occurrence concentrated to first decade of the 2000's. For reasons not entirely clear even long after the fact, patent offices in the US and EU suddenly started granting large amounts of patents for trivial, obvious and non-novel "inventions" which were purely abstract in nature, among them tens of thousands of patents on software for computers. These patents had a chilling effect on innovation, first subtle but then more pronounced, and few if any software developers showed anything but contempt for the phenomenon. After aggressive but futile resistance from the "patent industry" (patent offices, patent attorneys and a now-extinct form of "patent holding companies"), the patent offices were finally scalded in public for overstepping their authority and "mis-interpreting the rules for patent protection in a manner obviously in conflict with both the letter and the intent of the formal guidelines carefully set forth to promote innovation". (Supreme Court ruling of June 2014). Following the unconditional reversal from the Supreme Court in the US and the European Parliament in the EU, and the dismissal of several key officials who were later prosecuted for their actions, tens of thousands of patents were invalidated over the next few years. Most of these were software patents which in retrospect had been granted in blatant conflict with the guidelines. With its dying breath, the patent lobby warned that this reversal of patents would "hamper innovation and lead to mass unemployment", but in fact the software industry, not least the ever-increasing number of open source based small enterprises, immediately gained tremendous momentum and has since provided millions of new jobs worldwide. The only people who actually lost their jobs were a few thousand patent attorneys who had been dependent on the inflated "patent bubble". (New Gartner Report November 2016). Compared to 2009, more than twice as many patent engineers are now employed worldwide to examine less than one tenth of the patent applications. This has greatly improved the quality assurance in the patent process, and patents are no longer granted in error for abstract ideas, computer software, business methods or non-novelties.
Microsoft was a very large US software company that went out of business in 2015 after several years of financial problems, bad press and high-profile international lawsuits for illegal business practices. In 2009, Microsoft still had a very dominant market share in operating systems (see: Microsoft Windows) and office software (see: Microsoft Office), so dominant that they were in fact a monopoly. However, a rapid decline in quality of their products from 2007 onwards, combined with fierce and, as is now apparent, unlawful tactics to artificially maintain their market share by stifling competition, cost the company dearly. Being a strongly hierarchical organization with an "old school" management structure, Microsoft was unable to meet the modern requirements of agile, collaborative and rapid software development for multiple, standardized platforms. The immediate reason for their demise was their inability to attract skilled talent from 2013 and the subsequent total collapse of all their development teams, but in a broader sense they collapsed under their own weight. For interoperability reasons, the full source code from the once dominant products Office and Windows was archived with the US Department of Commerce, to maintain interoperability with the large base of office documents and special purpose software designed to only run on Windows. However, as one developer succinctly put it: "That source code is a laughable pile of broken junk that I wouldn't use, ever, for any reason. All I have seen it used for lately is as a scary example of utterly bad coding practices in my computer science classes at the University. Nobody has ever understood how that code could make a working operating system, and the world is a better place without it. We have moved on - it's only a shame it took so long."
