Re: "Bing was not even launched until 2009, eight years after the Microsoft case was settled. MSN Search, its predecessor, did launch in 1998, but with licensed

Re: "Bing was not even launched until 2009, eight years after the Microsoft case was settled. MSN Search, its predecessor, did launch in 1998, but with licensed search results from Inktomi and AltaVista; Microsoft didn’t launch its own web crawler until 2005" Had MS not been pressured by anti-trust scrutiny, they may have bought out early search startups. Therefore, MS may have been "late" to search due to anti-trust pressure, and not because they fumbled, as the author suggests. (We may never really know because this would have happened inside of Bill Gates' head.) Ironically, MS may have gotten its start by the fact that IBM felt pressured to make an open-architecture PC due to anti-trust scrutiny. Otherwise, they would have prefered to hard-wire their system for their own PC operating system (created or purchased). Re: "of course a browser should be bundled with an operating system; a new computer without a browser would be practically useless" Including and bundling are not necessarily the same thing. An OS can include multiple browser brands and/or make it easy for new buyers to install another brand. Re: "but rather the entire web; what ties things together are not APIs, but links." But standards are needed for links & browsers to work right across brands, and standards and API's are pretty much the same thing. Re: "Google would have emerged with or without antitrust action against Microsoft" We don't know that. See above. Re: "Facebook was dominant before it bought Instagram and WhatsApp, Google before it bought DoubleClick or YouTube, and Amazon before it bought..." True, but they were even more dominant after. It's a winner-take-all economy these days, reducing competition. They may have got big being good, but that alone is no guarantee they'll stay good. It's human nature to slack when competition fades. It's why the Gov't is not efficient. (Google Maps has been slipping in quality of late I've noticed.) Re: "the app market on PCs died in large part due to security concerns" Come again? Re: "Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple dominate because consumers like them. Each of them leveraged technology to solve a unique user needs" True, but once big they start using other tricks besides being good. Oligopolies and monopolies almost always jack up prices and limit choice once competition goes away. MS left blatant bugs in MS-Access for several years once they flattened the other desktop databases. Good capitalism is based on competition. Competition shrinks, and corporate jerkification and slacking goes up. They shift focus from making a better mouse-trap to keeping others out of the mouse-trap business. Warren's argument may not be perfect, but lack of competition clearly stifles the market in my observation of several decades dealing with the likes of Microsoft and the big telecoms, let alone the history of airlines, IBM, AT&T, eyeglasses, etc.