John, the problem with your model (and believe me you are not alone in this, the major media are MSFT-brainwashed) is that it assumes that every software startup will be moved in on by MSFT, IBM, etc. Interesting that you mention Netscape, seeing as they were nothing 2 years ago and now a huge company. A lot of people think MSFT will kill Netscape whereas I say, on the contrary, they will thrive.
You could have said "MSFT will never make it because IBM will move in on their business." But that didn't happen. You also could easily argue that DOS was a shitty product, far from the best, and that even when Windows 3.1 came along, Apple's OS was still better. How do we explain the phenomenal growth of such companies? I don't know but obviously there are a number of things: 1. If you're smart and know your niche the market is so big that there is room enough for all, 2. Marketing savvy! 3. The 'big boys' often dismiss your concept for long enough to let you get a good foothold. 4. You come up with a system or product that actually changes the way people work or live, and consequently it's like a mini-revolution 5. You'd better have sound management, and understanding of how to make decent money _before_ your growth REALLY kicks in, and cash on hand, so you hang around long enough 6. Get market share fast before anyone knows what hit them 7. Ride on some big company's coattails--help them to compete better... etc. etc. etc.
I don't think any of these big companies have plans to unveil a product that does what Livelink does. Livelink is "platform and browser agnostic" amongst other things. Yes, it's a competitive market, but wow, is it going to be a big one. And the system is 'scalable' so that it fits user needs. Many public institutions, libraries, etc., need less cumbersome forms of document management and search technology, but have no need for the workflow software...etc. On the other hand companies like Hewlett Packard and the oil and pharmaceutical companies which have recently become Open Text clients need applications which support 'mission critical' processes and do the 'heavy lifting' needed to organize information and projects in a large corporation's network.
I am not sure that Open Text is suited to capture all aspects of the intranet and document mgt. market...but the market is going to be big enough for everyone. A product which already works smoothly with a browser type desktop would seem to have a big lead. Many companies and institutions are working with outdated &/or proprietary systems and over the next 10 to 20 years everyone will be upgrading.
(I put the time frame this way because globally speaking many institutions are slow to upgrade technology.)
Does Open Text Livelink really offer a new way of doing things? Yes. Just as some companies (MSFT...Sun...Cisco) have benefitted from the changing nature of networks and computing in unpredictable ways, perhaps some will benefit from imminent changes to networks and software (Sun, Oracle, IBM, Corel...maybe), and some may benefit from a 'browser model' in the intranet (Netscape, MSFT, and who knows, maybe little old Open Text) whereas others will benefit in unpredictable ways from the rise of the WWW (Verifone, MSFT, Netscape, Centura, and a lot of regular businesses to say nothing of small time porn vendors). I'm talking general categories here, not necessarily 'competing products' in all their specificity.
I am betting that Open Text will 'catch a wave'. But certainly there will be many others and it sure takes more research time than I have to puzzle all this out.
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