Monopoly
... than java. Therefore, among the known base of 22 million coders in the industry, 8 million are loyal to Visual Basic, while only 3 million write applications in java. If people don’t write applications in java then the application server that allows them to develop the applications in the first time, and then to run the applications on their computers and networks, is not needed anymore. In other words, if people code more and more in Visual Basic, WebLogic is no longer needed by companies. BEA Systems has another problem: they are not the only company to provide application servers. Soon after they made fortune in the dot com boom, major companies such as IBM and Oracle came up with their own application servers. Since BEA was a relatively small-sized company, they were undercut on prices. And the market, which was fully theirs at the beginning of the boom, is now equally divided between the three companies. But unlike IBM and Oracle, for which the application server revenue is only a small part of their global revenue (thanks to other activities such as application software developing or business consulting), BEA has no other activity to cross-sell its star product. In 1997, the company went public, and its shares have fallen from $85 a year and a half ago to $10. For BEA Systems, the only solution to return to a fast growth is simple. They have to persuade more programmers to write in java. If coders do so, then their enterprises will need application servers to develop and run the programs in java. Therefore, BEA Systems has developed an evolved version of its star product: WebLogic Workshop, an ...