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But unlike Google (AFAIK), Microsoft played very dirty - they eventually paid for it (see e.g. [0]), but the gains from remaining a not-even-threatened monopoly
by beagle3 10y ago
But unlike Google (AFAIK), Microsoft played very dirty - they eventually paid for it (see e.g. [0]), but the gains from remaining a not-even-threatened monopoly where at 100-1000 times larger than what they paid.
I experienced this first hand at a company I worked for in the early '90s - we had agreements signed with many PC manufacturers to include our software (which was a DOS launcher of sort, that -- in those days of Win3.0 barely coming out, was more favored by users than Win3), and then all of a sudden, within 3 weeks, every single one of the manufacturers canceled -- and it later turned out Microsoft just visited each and every PC manufacturer and told them their MSDOS "discount" is going away if they bundle our launcher or anything similar.
In other markets, e.g. Office. in which, at the time, they were not a dominant player (Lotus123 was king, Borland Quattro was a strong player, Excel was less so; WordPerfect was king of pword processing), they actually competed by turning out better products.
[0] http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240052523/BeOS-will-live-on-as-Microsoft-settles-legal-action http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240052523/BeOS-will-live...
- pcwalton 10y agoThere are also instances in which Google has played not particularly fairly—releasing Chrome-only products such as Google Earth that require NaCl, for example.
- beagle3 10y agoGoogle are a business, not saints, and they do a lot of things that align with their interests and against the interests of their customers. However, I think this is not comparable to what Microsoft did in the OS business (the story I told, BeOS, DR-DOS, IE Bundling) -- an apt comparison would be if the Google Search Engine had been Chrome only, or mobile Googling was Android only. Google Earth is a niche product - I don't see how this (or any other less-than-fair Google practice I've ever heard of) can be considered abusing one's monopoly in any way.
- pc2g4d 10y agoOnly allowing redirects to be seen by Google Analytics, no competing analytics tools.
- beagle3 10y agoCan you elaborate?
- pc2g4d 10y agoMy apologies, I stated that wrong. I had thought I remembered there being an issue with Google's "Secure Search" making search keywords unavailable to websites (which it did) but that Google Analytics had a Google-specific way around that. But I can't find documentation for that, so it was probably me misunderstanding things.