Last night, I was cleaning up my Winamp playlists and noticed I had a few songs I hadn't listened to in a while. One of them was by Philippe Kahn and that brought back a rush of memories. Philippe started off playing the jazz saxophone, but moved to jazz flute due to a back issue.

Philippe Kahn was the maverick software king of the 80s and early 90s. He started Borland software, whose products included the monumental Sidekick and the always reliable Turbo Pascal.

Sidekick was one of the first TSR (terminate and stay resident) programs for the IBM PC. It stayed in memory until you hit a certain keystroke combination, then it sprung to life. Remember, we're talking the 80s here, so this was revolutionary.

Sidekick included a notepad, outliner, calendar, appointment book, alarms, directory management, clipboard and ASCII table. It was a swiss army knife for your PC and it was wildly successful.

Borland also, under Philippe Kahn's direction, released Turbo Pascal. Turbo Pascal lead many people, probably hundreds of thousands, into programming. My first real programs were created in Turbo Pascal and I used it to heavily modify the BBS I ran using WWIV BBS software. With these two products, Borland was a serious player in the DOS market due not only to their pricing, but to their quality. They also branched out into word processing with Sprint and spreadsheets Quattro Pro.

Sprint was the real man's word processor. While others loved Wordstar or Word Perfect, Sprint allowed full control of your text and placement through commands. It was fantastic for handling larger documents and some of it's features such as a complete macro language and auto save were ahead of its time. Unfortunately, it was released in 1988 or so and was quickly beaten in the market by the WYSIWYG word processors.

Quattro Pro was Borland's answer to Lotus 123. You need to remember that prior to Windows Microsoft's word processor and spreadsheet were always beaten in the market place by others. Quattro Pro was famous for challenging Lotus as the Quattro Pro commands worked the same as Lotus 123. Quattro Pro had some success in the marketplace, but it wasn't to be. Windows 95 was released and Quattro Pro was sold to Novell, which had just bought Word Perfect. An attempt was made to fight for the windows office market, but Microsoft won.

Philippe Kahn's attitude towards fighting the industry leaders was legendary, but he left Borland to go onto other companies. He's the main force behind picture phones and his current company, fullpower, will launch on February 15, 2007. Who knows what he's going to do.

And this is what the computing industry sorely lacks today. Competition in the marketplace for software as Microsoft dominates most markets. Who are the people standing up against Microsoft that matter?

Microsoft is a good company that produces good software, but think about how much better their products would be if legitimate companies were pushing them harder.

In an interview with Wired in 2000, Philippe Kahn said:

But do you think a Microsoft breakup would be good for users?

Well, one thing is true, if I look at the state of spreadsheets since Quattro Pro, it hasn't changed; in fact it's worse. There needs to be innovation there. Microsoft is an entity - it is in some ways an old-world company. But it has a lot of power, because everybody uses a word processor or a spreadsheet. If you set your sights on building the best possible text processing system, you would never build something like Word. But if you set out to have a monopoly on word processors worldwide, you'd probably build something obscure and complicated that people can't reverse-engineer or clean-room-implement. When you have 90 percent share, you tend to go to 100 percent, not 80, because it's harder and harder for people to compete. I think it's a fundamental problem. Is the best solution to break up Microsoft? I don't know. I'm lucky enough to have lived in a non-Microsoft world for the last six years. Microsoft is not a factor here.

Who are the Philippe Kahn's of today?