Perhaps you've got better things to do over the festive season, but if you want to be dragged back to the demise of the British motorcycle industry, you've just hit paydirt.

On the face of it Motorbikes and IT have very little in common. However, if you look back to the 1960's maybe there is a trend which could be worrying for the US software industry.

Has the US software industry got overconfident? Will we all be computing in the clouds 5-10-20 years down the line? Are discrete software and hardware packages deader than the dodo?

Recently I've reviewed a couple of software packages from Chinese companies - server partition management from Easeus and an enterprise network protocol analysis package called Capsa from Colasoft. Both were efficient, neat and did exactly what they said on the tin. In fact PowerQuest's server partition manager software, acquired by Symantec stopped at version 8.0 and was never upgraded to support Microsoft's newer server operating systems. So spotting a gap in the market, is maybe the first step to global domination..

A gap in the market was precisely what did for the UK's motorcycle industry, as the Japanese started off producing small commuter-type machines which were cheap, and more reliable. The UK's manufacturers never thought the Japanese would be able to produce a bike aimed directly at their own market. As such, the Honda CB750 must have been quite a shock and the death of motorcycle manufacturing in the UK followed pretty swiftly.

The Chinese appear to be doing the same with software packages, and you can bet the US software giants probably don't consider China's software industry as capable of coming out with software's equivalent of the CB750. Chinese telecoms firm Huawei, seem to be doing OK. Could the same happen in the software market? Time will tell.

Of course, it could be that all the festive drink has befuddled my brain, and my perception of things to come may be way off the mark - but stranger things have happened.

Happy New Year