5 ms·

An oral history of the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit

62 points by danso 8y ago

yuhong 8y ago
My favorite is Browsium: https://twitter.com/yuhong2/status/925794295675731968 https://twitter.com/yuhong2/status/925794295675731968
aaron-lebo 8y ago
No matter what shine Microsoft or Gates have since put on their actions, this should never be forgotten. This was a person and company so greedy that billions upon billions weren't enough, complete control was necessary. Has Gates ever come out and acknowledged that his actions at that time were wrong? In retrospect it's kind of amazing that the government even took the actions they did there. It's hard to imagine today. The article touches on it, but the big companies seem to have wizened up to it. They don't need or want complete control, they just want control of their customers. Every once in awhile they'll send off a 1984-ish salvo against each other, but actually outright winning is too costly. It's way too productive to just screw over customers, and they all do it, because they can. The discussion about Google and others at the end is interesting: He understood completely what Microsoft was doing, and, as I like to say, there are only about eight plays in the monopolist’s playbook. He saw all of them. So that when he got market power [as the CEO of Google], he could execute those same kinds of exclusionary plays and he knew exactly what to do. He knew what worked for Microsoft and what didn’t. It’s a very, very parallel situation. … There are no coincidences here. Unfortunately with government as it is in the US, it's probably not going to save us. It's going to take new, better companies to beat the current giants. Hopefully some of you are trying. As an aside, this video of the Windows 95 launch is great. Ballmer is naturally acting like an idiot, but there's Gates in the background, so seemingly mild, but whom was in fact one of the most cutthroat businessmen in the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM.
- blueside 8y ago
  Like clockwork, this kind of anti-MS comment get downvoted on HN. I've been fascinated by this, what am I missing? Gates is highly celebrated now, but it seems like he was the furthest thing from a fair and honest competitor. If Gates and Ballmer had their way, I don't want to even imagine what the internet would look like today.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Have any of the modern tech companies been "fair and honest" competitors? How was what MS did back in the day any different from what Google did to Yelp or various shopping sites (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/you-should-be-outraged-at-googles-anti-competitive-behavior/2017/07/07/e117b704-5de1-11e7-9b7d-14576dc0f39d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/you-should-be-outrag...) The antitrust case didn't have much to do with Microsoft's loss of dominance to Google, Apple, Amazon and FB.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Gates is highly celebrated now, but it seems like he was the furthest thing from a fair and honest competitor. Compared to Uber, Google, Facebook and Theranos, Gates and co are saints. The standard for "evil" has shifted a lot since the 90s, now those look like innocent times!
  - furgooswft13 8y ago
    > If Gates and Ballmer had their way, I don't want to even imagine what the internet would look like today. Could it be worse than the bloated javascript ad-ridden social media hellscape we have today? All Microsoft "did" to the internet was abandon development on their dominant browser as a way to keep developers on the Windows platform. And lo-and-behold, _market forces_ foiled their plans on that one, not the government. If anything did the internet in, it was the iPhone and the mass adoption of smartphones afterwards, which brought in untold numbers of tech-illiterate consumers to be easily exploited by our current crop of Evil Tech Companies.
  - dang 8y ago
    Most anti-Microsoft comments don't get downvoted. Out of curiosity, I looked through https://hn.algolia.com/?query=microsoft&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=microsoft&sort=byDate&dateRang... for recent negative comments about Microsoft, and 3 out of 4 were upvoted. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162203 was heavily upvoted. Most things people say about HN comments aren't true in general, but only of the subset of comments that the person happens to notice. And we notice the things we dislike way more than we notice everything else.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Every business is cuttthroat. Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc aren't run by Mother Theresa acolytes.
  - aaron-lebo 8y ago
    Of course, and that's what I'm saying. We, as consumers and employees of these companies should have a higher standard than "they did it, too".
    - scarface74 8y ago
      So what alternatives do consumers have? It's the nature of capitalism that every company does what it can to legally maximize profit.
      - aaron-lebo 8y ago
        It's the nature of those companies, but there's nothing that says capitalism requires that.
        scarface74 8y ago
        Yes it does. The minute a company doesn't maximize profit you will have activist shareholders come in and demand they do something!to increase profit.
        aaron-lebo 8y ago
        You don't have to go public and you don't have to always go for short term profit (Bezos didn't, for a long time). This is just how the game is played because that's how it has always been played. It's not very imaginative if we assume that maximizing profit is truly the requirement of all companies, because it's not. There's also nothing that says that customer satisfaction and profit aren't mutual, it's just many companies lean towards profit.
brudgers 8y ago
The thing about oral histories is that they are oral histories. The oral history of Microsoft v. Netscape is only interesting because it elides the story of Netscape. Andreesen was able to found Andreesen Horowitz only because by scholarly historical accounts Netscape was a tremendously successful startup by the standard startup metrics: Netscape's founders found themselves incredibly wealthy and initial investors like Kleiner Perkins achieved good internal rates of return (IRR) and anyone in the general public who bought and held Netscape shares near the closing price on the day of the IPO did well when Netscape sold to AOL for $10 billion a few years later. If there's a villain in Netscape's trajectory it's AOL. Or hubris: Netscape's engineers decided to rewrite it from the ground up. Like all oral histories, this one has its tribal roots. One of the distinct features of Microsoft is that Silicon Valley venture capital wasn't involved. In part because Microsoft isn't a Silicon Valley company and hence not a Silicon Valley success story. In fact it is the worst kind of not-a-Silicon-Valley success story. It made 10,000 ordinary employees millionaire or better rich, the founders even richer, and Silicon Valley venture capital standing outside, noses pressed against the glass. The laissez-faire/libratarian/randian Silicon Valley business culture celebrating Microsoft's anti-trust as a morality play is perfectly titrated irony. Or sour grapes.
- mistrial9 8y ago
  "It made 10,000 ordinary employees millionaire or better rich, the founders even richer" soft-pedalling here much? The founder became THE RICHEST man in THE WORLD for TWENTY+ straight years. Any other large sources of income, in say, the entire world? M$FT under the shark-like junior managers became close to a Mafia, using threats, law-suits and marketing soft-money bribery to run roughshod over an industry. Buying and killing companies by the dozen, or simply crushing them for bragging rights at the golf course well after monopoly power was in effect. The defense of 10,000 engineers got rich has a bad smell to it, considering there are now 2.5 million programmers in the US alone and who-knows-how-many worldwide. Look at the leadership and the actions, as well as the booty.
  - xapata 8y ago
    In a sense, Gates is still the wealthiest, if including the amount he's spent/given. Sure there was some degree of villainy, but nothing compared to the kind perpetrated by less famous companies that pollute and/or murder. Microsoft's evil was the kind of first-world problem that we love to get distracted by. Conversely, Gates' charity mostly affects people the "developed" countries like to ignore/exploit.
ncmncm 8y ago
I will never understand how MS execs didn't go to jail for contempt of court when their fraudulent video was exposed. Nor how David Boies went from there to representing SCO. Or how SCO counsel and execs alike avoided contempt of court, with their own shenanigans. Getting caught lying to a jury is one thing, lying to the judge...
- yuhong 8y ago
  My favorite is the OS/2 2.0 debacle BTW.
oautholaf 8y ago
One thing that happened after the finding of fact (in early 2000) is that the Microsoft stock price fell in half and stayed roughly at that value for the next ~15 years. So even if the actual government anti-trust actions didn't seem that dramatic, there was definitely a measurable effect. As someone who was at Microsoft during this era and down in Silicon Valley in the 2000's, I'm very much glad that it did happen. Although I did make money while I was at Microsoft, it's difficult for me to imagine how the things I worked on after I left (such as an early consumer smartphone) would have been possible with Microsoft at full strength.
netinmate 8y ago
I was an insider at Netscape, not "name" person but I was there for all the important moments. I wish I could tell all my stories, but then it would be easy to identify me and I'm content not being identified. Having watched the game from a front row seat, there was no honor in what he did, not just to Netscape, but to everyone that crossed his path. I was embarrassed for him on numerous occasions. The usual yardstick by which we measure success is monetary, and by that measure Gates is one of the best, as a person he left more than a lot to be desired. He is currently doing good work, but he still leaves a lot to be desired as a humanitarian, it's more self serving than it should be, but than again, Gates just wants to let us all know that it's his world and we are just living in it. It takes a certain personality type to step on the throat of a tiny competitor just because you want an extra dollar or two of profit, I'm not referring to Netscape in this example. Of course I can't imagine how Larry Ellison would have acted had he Microsoft's monopoly, that thought really makes me shudder, and I got to see Larry up close and personal as well. Gates did what the government allowed him to do, he was able to exploit IBM's former monopoly and create a new monopoly.
- Ntrails 8y ago
  > He is currently doing good work, but he still leaves a lot to be desired as a humanitarian, it's more self serving than it should be, but than again, Gates just wants to let us all know that it's his world and we are just living in it. I can rarely discern my own motives for an action with any great certainty, impressive that you're so accurately able to assess his.
skookumchuck 8y ago
The trouble with poor Netscape was their browser crashed constantly, and IE crashed much less often. People preferred IE. Netscape simply shipped a much crappier browser. I had both installed for a while, and finally deleted the Netscape one. Nobody coerced me.

62 points by danso 8y ago

My favorite is Browsium: https://twitter.com/yuhong2/status/925794295675731968 https://twitter.com/yuhong2/status/925794295675731968

aaron-lebo 8y ago

No matter what shine Microsoft or Gates have since put on their actions, this should never be forgotten. This was a person and company so greedy that billions upon billions weren't enough, complete control was necessary. Has Gates ever come out and acknowledged that his actions at that time were wrong? In retrospect it's kind of amazing that the government even took the actions they did there. It's hard to imagine today. The article touches on it, but the big companies seem to have wizened up to it. They don't need or want complete control, they just want control of their customers. Every once in awhile they'll send off a 1984-ish salvo against each other, but actually outright winning is too costly. It's way too productive to just screw over customers, and they all do it, because they can. The discussion about Google and others at the end is interesting: He understood completely what Microsoft was doing, and, as I like to say, there are only about eight plays in the monopolist’s playbook. He saw all of them. So that when he got market power [as the CEO of Google], he could execute those same kinds of exclusionary plays and he knew exactly what to do. He knew what worked for Microsoft and what didn’t. It’s a very, very parallel situation. … There are no coincidences here. Unfortunately with government as it is in the US, it's probably not going to save us. It's going to take new, better companies to beat the current giants. Hopefully some of you are trying. As an aside, this video of the Windows 95 launch is great. Ballmer is naturally acting like an idiot, but there's Gates in the background, so seemingly mild, but whom was in fact one of the most cutthroat businessmen in the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM.

blueside 8y ago
Like clockwork, this kind of anti-MS comment get downvoted on HN. I've been fascinated by this, what am I missing? Gates is highly celebrated now, but it seems like he was the furthest thing from a fair and honest competitor. If Gates and Ballmer had their way, I don't want to even imagine what the internet would look like today.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Have any of the modern tech companies been "fair and honest" competitors? How was what MS did back in the day any different from what Google did to Yelp or various shopping sites (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/you-should-be-outraged-at-googles-anti-competitive-behavior/2017/07/07/e117b704-5de1-11e7-9b7d-14576dc0f39d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/you-should-be-outrag...) The antitrust case didn't have much to do with Microsoft's loss of dominance to Google, Apple, Amazon and FB.
- gaius 8y ago
  Gates is highly celebrated now, but it seems like he was the furthest thing from a fair and honest competitor. Compared to Uber, Google, Facebook and Theranos, Gates and co are saints. The standard for "evil" has shifted a lot since the 90s, now those look like innocent times!
- furgooswft13 8y ago
  > If Gates and Ballmer had their way, I don't want to even imagine what the internet would look like today. Could it be worse than the bloated javascript ad-ridden social media hellscape we have today? All Microsoft "did" to the internet was abandon development on their dominant browser as a way to keep developers on the Windows platform. And lo-and-behold, _market forces_ foiled their plans on that one, not the government. If anything did the internet in, it was the iPhone and the mass adoption of smartphones afterwards, which brought in untold numbers of tech-illiterate consumers to be easily exploited by our current crop of Evil Tech Companies.
- dang 8y ago
  Most anti-Microsoft comments don't get downvoted. Out of curiosity, I looked through https://hn.algolia.com/?query=microsoft&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=microsoft&sort=byDate&dateRang... for recent negative comments about Microsoft, and 3 out of 4 were upvoted. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162203 was heavily upvoted. Most things people say about HN comments aren't true in general, but only of the subset of comments that the person happens to notice. And we notice the things we dislike way more than we notice everything else.
scarface74 8y ago
Every business is cuttthroat. Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc aren't run by Mother Theresa acolytes.
- aaron-lebo 8y ago
  Of course, and that's what I'm saying. We, as consumers and employees of these companies should have a higher standard than "they did it, too".
  - scarface74 8y ago
    So what alternatives do consumers have? It's the nature of capitalism that every company does what it can to legally maximize profit.
    - aaron-lebo 8y ago
      It's the nature of those companies, but there's nothing that says capitalism requires that.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Yes it does. The minute a company doesn't maximize profit you will have activist shareholders come in and demand they do something!to increase profit.
        aaron-lebo 8y ago
        You don't have to go public and you don't have to always go for short term profit (Bezos didn't, for a long time). This is just how the game is played because that's how it has always been played. It's not very imaginative if we assume that maximizing profit is truly the requirement of all companies, because it's not. There's also nothing that says that customer satisfaction and profit aren't mutual, it's just many companies lean towards profit.

brudgers 8y ago

The thing about oral histories is that they are oral histories. The oral history of Microsoft v. Netscape is only interesting because it elides the story of Netscape. Andreesen was able to found Andreesen Horowitz only because by scholarly historical accounts Netscape was a tremendously successful startup by the standard startup metrics: Netscape's founders found themselves incredibly wealthy and initial investors like Kleiner Perkins achieved good internal rates of return (IRR) and anyone in the general public who bought and held Netscape shares near the closing price on the day of the IPO did well when Netscape sold to AOL for $10 billion a few years later. If there's a villain in Netscape's trajectory it's AOL. Or hubris: Netscape's engineers decided to rewrite it from the ground up. Like all oral histories, this one has its tribal roots. One of the distinct features of Microsoft is that Silicon Valley venture capital wasn't involved. In part because Microsoft isn't a Silicon Valley company and hence not a Silicon Valley success story. In fact it is the worst kind of not-a-Silicon-Valley success story. It made 10,000 ordinary employees millionaire or better rich, the founders even richer, and Silicon Valley venture capital standing outside, noses pressed against the glass. The laissez-faire/libratarian/randian Silicon Valley business culture celebrating Microsoft's anti-trust as a morality play is perfectly titrated irony. Or sour grapes.

mistrial9 8y ago
"It made 10,000 ordinary employees millionaire or better rich, the founders even richer" soft-pedalling here much? The founder became THE RICHEST man in THE WORLD for TWENTY+ straight years. Any other large sources of income, in say, the entire world? M$FT under the shark-like junior managers became close to a Mafia, using threats, law-suits and marketing soft-money bribery to run roughshod over an industry. Buying and killing companies by the dozen, or simply crushing them for bragging rights at the golf course well after monopoly power was in effect. The defense of 10,000 engineers got rich has a bad smell to it, considering there are now 2.5 million programmers in the US alone and who-knows-how-many worldwide. Look at the leadership and the actions, as well as the booty.
- xapata 8y ago
  In a sense, Gates is still the wealthiest, if including the amount he's spent/given. Sure there was some degree of villainy, but nothing compared to the kind perpetrated by less famous companies that pollute and/or murder. Microsoft's evil was the kind of first-world problem that we love to get distracted by. Conversely, Gates' charity mostly affects people the "developed" countries like to ignore/exploit.

ncmncm 8y ago

I will never understand how MS execs didn't go to jail for contempt of court when their fraudulent video was exposed. Nor how David Boies went from there to representing SCO. Or how SCO counsel and execs alike avoided contempt of court, with their own shenanigans. Getting caught lying to a jury is one thing, lying to the judge...

yuhong 8y ago
My favorite is the OS/2 2.0 debacle BTW.

oautholaf 8y ago

One thing that happened after the finding of fact (in early 2000) is that the Microsoft stock price fell in half and stayed roughly at that value for the next ~15 years. So even if the actual government anti-trust actions didn't seem that dramatic, there was definitely a measurable effect. As someone who was at Microsoft during this era and down in Silicon Valley in the 2000's, I'm very much glad that it did happen. Although I did make money while I was at Microsoft, it's difficult for me to imagine how the things I worked on after I left (such as an early consumer smartphone) would have been possible with Microsoft at full strength.

netinmate 8y ago

I was an insider at Netscape, not "name" person but I was there for all the important moments. I wish I could tell all my stories, but then it would be easy to identify me and I'm content not being identified. Having watched the game from a front row seat, there was no honor in what he did, not just to Netscape, but to everyone that crossed his path. I was embarrassed for him on numerous occasions. The usual yardstick by which we measure success is monetary, and by that measure Gates is one of the best, as a person he left more than a lot to be desired. He is currently doing good work, but he still leaves a lot to be desired as a humanitarian, it's more self serving than it should be, but than again, Gates just wants to let us all know that it's his world and we are just living in it. It takes a certain personality type to step on the throat of a tiny competitor just because you want an extra dollar or two of profit, I'm not referring to Netscape in this example. Of course I can't imagine how Larry Ellison would have acted had he Microsoft's monopoly, that thought really makes me shudder, and I got to see Larry up close and personal as well. Gates did what the government allowed him to do, he was able to exploit IBM's former monopoly and create a new monopoly.

Ntrails 8y ago
> He is currently doing good work, but he still leaves a lot to be desired as a humanitarian, it's more self serving than it should be, but than again, Gates just wants to let us all know that it's his world and we are just living in it. I can rarely discern my own motives for an action with any great certainty, impressive that you're so accurately able to assess his.

skookumchuck 8y ago

The trouble with poor Netscape was their browser crashed constantly, and IE crashed much less often. People preferred IE. Netscape simply shipped a much crappier browser. I had both installed for a while, and finally deleted the Netscape one. Nobody coerced me.