Here's a short story that ought to give pause to anyone who thinks that Microsoft's ownership of the enterprise is a permanent and unyielding fact.

Granted, it's told by the CEO of Red Hat, an open-source competitor, but it still portrays a reality that will increasingly put pressure on Microsoft's software-licensing model.

Jon Brodkin, ComputerWorld:

As chief executive of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst spends much of his time traveling the world and talking to CIOs, and he constantly hears one thing: that they are "under siege" by user expectations.

People's richest IT experiences these days happen at home, with Google, Facebook, Twitter, iTunes and the like, Whitehurst said in his keynote address Wednesday at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. In the workplace, IT budgets are rising but actual services are improving incrementally at best, he said.

"I talked to one CIO who said, 'look, my biggest competitor is Google,'" Whitehurst said.

The unnamed CIO works for what Whitehurst described as a "big industrial logistics company." A few months ago the CIO was asked by the chief marketing officer to provide a way for marketing employees around the world to share and build documents together, and perform other collaborative tasks.

The CIO discussed the project with his application development group, then went back to the CMO and said "we can do this, in nine months at a cost of $14 million," according to Whitehurst.

"The CMO says 'what are you talking about? I was describing my daughter's high school science project.' And they were on Google Documents, sharing information, jointly editing documents, and they're doing it for free. This is a true story. I may have been slightly off on the numbers, but a true story."

Microsoft bulls who once assumed the company's dominance of the Internet was just a matter of time are now equally confident that the company will never lose its hold on the enterprise. Stories like the one above, as well as the simple usage habits of the tens of thousands of individual people who make up enterprises, suggest otherwise.

Now, if Microsoft can transition its products to the cloud, which it has begun doing, it's possible that they will eventually see the same wholesale user-driven adoption that has boosted the early fortunes of Google Apps, Apple's iPhone/iPad, and so on.

And it's also possible that Microsoft may be able to continue to transition to a services model, a la IBM, and thus avoid having its business destroyed.

But it's unlikely that such a new model will be as profitable as the old one, and the transition won't likely be smooth.

See Also: The Odds Are Increasing That Microsoft's Business May Collapse