When companies fail to adapt to market demands, they lose out ? and so do their customers IT’S AMAZING. Businesses work so hard to become the top dog. They become the leaders in their fields. And then the unthinkable happens: In a jealous effort to guard their position, they lock themselves out of new business and technological paradigms, sealing their fate. In their fervor to protect their position, they destroy it. And new, unfettered business models rise into prominence. Sound far-fetched? Not at all. This became clear to me a few years ago at a conference. A European attendee showed me an all-in-one cell phone, PDA, and wireless Internet device. He had been using it for about two years. Only now, about four years after he began using his useful gizmo, am I starting to see comparable devices in this country. Why? Well, in the United States, cellular technology is being championed by many of the large companies responsible for the overwhelming success of the old wired technology. These companies are too busy milking profits from the old wired infrastructure to invalidate it through massive deployment of a wireless infrastructure. The net result is that these companies are reaping profits while the rest of the world passes them — and us, their customers — by. You see, much of the rest of the world was not nearly as successful at creating an extensive wired infrastructure. So they’ve gladly abandoned their minimally wired world to take the lead in wireless connectivity. But this problem is not unique to telecommunications. It is also an issue with software. Take companies that had great success in the last generation of software. Giants such as Microsoft and Oracle have become formidable because their business practices are built on closed-source business models. Though they’ve been lucrative in the past, that situation is rapidly changing. The rise of Linux and other open-source solutions changes the nature of competition. If the reign of current software giants is to continue, they will need to rapidly change with the market or be left behind. In particular, companies that try to defeat the advance of open source through the legal system (such as the current efforts to get world governments to exclude the use of open source in the public sector) are doomed for failure and obsolescence. They’ll make money in the short term and fade into history just when they think they’ve won. But what does this mean for the IT consumer? A lot of IT managers want to make a safe choice in technology partners, but they should be aware that yesterday’s safe choice will be tomorrow’s hazardous position when their partner tries to resist the flow of the market. And a footnote to those of you who responded to my Oct. 28 column (see “DMCA horror show” ): The time to submit your feedback to the U.S. Copyright Office is at hand. Starting Nov. 19, you may use the link in the Open Source forum at www.infoworld.com/os to express your opinion. Technology Industry