Together with China, that would account for roughly 40 percent of the world's population. Couple that with IBM's push to run Linux on all of its hardware platforms, and the popularity of Linux in Europe, and it's not that farfetched to see the balance of power shifting very rapidly. No wonder the folks in Redmond are worried. At stake are many billions of potential customers. With those kinds of numbers, it's hard to argue that one OS is better than another, or even that one database is better than another.
Technology is, like global politics, a numbers game.
There was a time when U.S. companies dominated virtually every aspect of technology and made the lion's share of decisions. That power base appears to be seriously and quickly eroding. In addition, as offshore markets become more Internet-savvy, they have the sheer numbers to swiftly tilt the power scale in their favor. This trend has been under way for some time. The Computing Technology Industry Association has been watching certification boom outside of this country, and many of its decisions now involve players in foreign countries.