Editorial: Pitfalls Of Monopoly Software

Above all else, what the last week’s IT outage at airports, banks, media houses, financial institutions et al shows is the over-dependence on one single software system: Microsoft’s Windows powers more than 70% of the IT systems at these public-dealing organisations. Apple and Linux software powers the remaining 30%. The last two were not affected by the malware accidentally introduced by the major service provider, CrowdStrike, into the Windows-powered systems across the global chain. It was ironic that trouble arose when CrowdStrike sought to upgrade the systems in order to make it more secure against hackers. Airports, including in India, suffered long delays as airlines were forced to either suspend a lot of flights or delay them inordinately due to manual checking. In the highly interconnected world such outages cannot be completely ruled out. But the IT czars need to consider whether such overwhelming dependence on a single computer running system and a single service provider is a wise idea. Where are America’s anti-trust champions?