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I imagine AWS and Amazon are going to be split up. I say this as someone who dearly loves Amazon and who is an AWS SA Pro Cert / my job depends on them. Antitr
by Bucephalus355 9y ago
I imagine AWS and Amazon are going to be split up. I say this as someone who dearly loves Amazon and who is an AWS SA Pro Cert / my job depends on them.
Antitrust legal theory has grown by leaps and bounds from 20 years ago. Now there are so many theories related to what a monopoly is, even in the absence of a single dominant company, oppressive pricing, etc. When these legal theories migrate from academia to politics is anyone’s guess though (not commenting on if it’s fair also, just noting).
This was 100% going to happen to Microsoft with their Office and Windows division being split up, but then the judge in the case, who was very accomplished and smart, made the mistake of sitting down for several interviews with a journalist about the trial BEFORE THE CASE WAS OVER. Microsoft’s lawyers leaped on this, and were able to save the company.
One consequence though was Bill Gates accelerated departure from CEO into Chairman and the taking over of Steve Ballmer (ugh).
- dboreham 9y agoI'm not sure that the MS antitrust cases are a good example to hold up now because it can be pointed out that MS got the crap beaten out of them subsequently (without the need to split them up) because technology moves on and today's monopoly is tomorrow's legacy junk.
- us0r 9y ago2001 - 22.96 billion / 11.01 operating income 2017 - 90 billion / 22.3 operating income I would love getting the crap beat out of me with my legacy junk and these figures.
- CydeWeys 9y agoYou need to adjust those figures for inflation, for starters. And compare to the total performance of an index over the same time range, e.g. the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested.
- jjeaff 9y ago23 billion in 2001 adjusted for inflation is only around 30 billion. Compared to the sp500, msft has also killed it by a factor of 2. http://performance.morningstar.com/stock/performance-return.action?t=MSFT®ion=usa&culture=en-US http://performance.morningstar.com/stock/performance-return.... In that chart you can also see that it has also outperformed the software industry average.
- CydeWeys 9y agoGood, now we have a valid comparison. Thanks.
- dboreham 9y agoWell: the proposal was to split the company into a Windows company and an Office company because they were using the Windows monopoly to enforce an Office monopoly, and requiring everyone to use their browser. Guess what? Today there is no Windows monopoly (certainly not with hipsters and their Macbooks), Office continues to dominate _because_ it runs cross-platform, and nobody uses the default Windows browser.