ResearchSoft - Bibliographic Software Monopoly?

[Cliff Urr]

>From a recent Woody's Windows Watch #2.13:

"Looking at the high tech scene, one notes increased anti-trust 
activity by the DOJ and FTC.  But remarkably, the smaller stuff 
seems to elude  them.  Take bibliographic software.  This is 
admittedly a backwater for  many but for those librarians and 
academics that need it, it is a  critical component of their working 
software set.  A few years ago, there were three major 
suppliers/products.  Reference Information Systems (RIS)
 had Reference Manager, Professional Bibliographic Software had 
ProCite  and Niles Software had EndNote.  In particular, Niles was 
aggressive on  price and caused prices to drop from the $800 range 
to the $200-$400  range.  These three companies had different 
market niches (ProCite  dominated the librarian market while 
Reference Manager the medical  research community) but covered 
virtually the entire market for personal bibliographic databases, a 
market estimated at 300,000 users.  

Then the fun started.  Reference Information Systems bought ProCite 
and in turn it became a division of the Institute for Scientific 
Information, aka ISI (which is the leader in providing libraries with 
comprehensive bibliographic databases - for example complete 
contents of journals), which is itself owned by the huge publishing 
conglomerate Thomson.  On April 14, ISI announced the acquisition 
of Niles Software and its intent to merge it and RIS into a new 
company called ResearchSoft.  I haven't market figures but I'd guess 
that this company will have close to 100% of the market for software 
to manage personal bibliographic databases.  But the Feds seem to 
be asleep."