Will architecture win the technology wars

: Success today flows to the company that establishes proprietary architectural control over a broad, fast-moving, competitive space, Charles R. Morris and Charles H. Ferguson claim in "How Architecture Wins Technology Wars" (March-April 1993). No single vendor can keep pace with the outpouring of cheap, powerful, mass-produced components, so customers have been stitching together their own local systems solutions. Architectures impose order on the system and make interconnections possible. An architectural controller has power over the standard by which the entire information package is assembled. Because of the popularity of Microsoft's Windows, for example, companies like Lotus must conform their software to its parameters to be able to compete for market share. Proprietary architectural control has broader implications for organizational structure too: architectural competition is giving rise to a new form of business organization.