But in these "cloud computing" days of accessing software remotely over Internet-hooked data centers, Cisco and Oracle are becoming direct competitors.
What was it about the Internet that hooked him?
At least 200,000 Internet users are hooked on pornography sites, X-rated chat rooms or other sexual materials online, researchers found in one of the first studies to have estimated the number of "cybersex compulsives".
A couple of years ago, noticing his father watching Bloomberg on TV, he started looking up stock stuff on the Internet and became hooked on the terror and joy of the market.
Especially vulnerable to becoming hooked on Internet sex, he wrote, are "those users whose sexuality may have been suppressed and limited all their lives [who] suddenly find an infinite supply of sexual opportunities" on the Internet.
Those most strongly hooked on Internet sex are likely to spend hours each day masturbating to pornographic images or having "mutual" online sex with someone contacted through a chat room.
Ben Jones (not his real name) a gamer known by his online persona of Onibobo, is part of the growing sub-culture of young people, particularly male, who appear to have become hooked on internet gaming.
"There are 100 million machines hooked to the Internet, all of them doing nothing a lot of the time," said James Gannon, chief technology officer of Parabon Computation, one of several first-time exhibitors in Dallas this month at supercomputing's biggest trade show.
The decision of airing the series online was aimed at attracting "the young and the restless hooked to the internet and the social media".
Still, there is some question as to whether being hooked to the internet or computer games is a legitimate addiction, on par with say, substance abuse or gambling.
