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Antitrust hit Microsoft's corporate culture to the core. It had a dramatic effect on the company and it's leadership. I wonder whether a serious and prolonged

Antitrust hit Microsoft's corporate culture to the core. It had a dramatic effect on the company and it's leadership. I wonder whether a serious and prolonged litigation will affect Google as deeply a well.

smush 7y ago
Possibly. I started writing this comment and then ran out of insights to make, but the rough draft is posted below since I already typed it out and it's not utter drivel, if not that deep. Speaking as a layman, the MS corporate culture, at least viewed through the lens of PR releases, system documentation, and MS press tech books through the years somewhat fuzzily expresses the corporate culture. The first books I became aware of were from the 9x era when an ascendant Microsoft was eating Be/Amiga/Apple/Sun and everyone else's breakfast lunch and dinner in the desktop space. Things either worked Microsoft's way, or not at all. Post anti-trust, MS suddenly was markedly open to doing things with inter-operability (which ~= backwards-compatibility) in mind, as long as you used primarly Microsoft's product offerings and kept the unwashed masses of Linux away in a closet somewhere. These days, the culture seems to be a similar idea, but the product offering has moved up the stack from OS, RDBMS, or AD forest to CI/CD pipeline, compute cloud platform, and Office suite. We love Linux and open source, by the way have you tried our new Azure cloud?
the_duke 7y ago
Interesting, do you have some links exploring this topic further?
- macintux 7y ago
  This is a too-brief but interesting oral history: https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/18/17362452/microsoft-antitrust-lawsuit-netscape-internet-explorer-20-years https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/18/17362452/microsoft-... Gates was a business shark before the trial. Absolutely ruthless. It’s hard to say how much of the changes are due to the court case, vs a changing technical landscape, vs the company growing to an enormous size, vs Gates simply getting older, but certainly after there were far fewer stories about his passion for crushing any company that might compete with him. And promising to support Office on the Mac after Jobs returned to Apple definitely smells of a response to anti-trust concerns, and it was critical at that point in time to Apple.
busterarm 7y ago
Probably what Google does every time they get some negative attention: Circle the wagons. It's also the worst thing that they can do, in this case.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

smush 7y ago

Possibly. I started writing this comment and then ran out of insights to make, but the rough draft is posted below since I already typed it out and it's not utter drivel, if not that deep. Speaking as a layman, the MS corporate culture, at least viewed through the lens of PR releases, system documentation, and MS press tech books through the years somewhat fuzzily expresses the corporate culture. The first books I became aware of were from the 9x era when an ascendant Microsoft was eating Be/Amiga/Apple/Sun and everyone else's breakfast lunch and dinner in the desktop space. Things either worked Microsoft's way, or not at all. Post anti-trust, MS suddenly was markedly open to doing things with inter-operability (which ~= backwards-compatibility) in mind, as long as you used primarly Microsoft's product offerings and kept the unwashed masses of Linux away in a closet somewhere. These days, the culture seems to be a similar idea, but the product offering has moved up the stack from OS, RDBMS, or AD forest to CI/CD pipeline, compute cloud platform, and Office suite. We love Linux and open source, by the way have you tried our new Azure cloud?

the_duke 7y ago

Interesting, do you have some links exploring this topic further?

macintux 7y ago
This is a too-brief but interesting oral history: https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/18/17362452/microsoft-antitrust-lawsuit-netscape-internet-explorer-20-years https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/18/17362452/microsoft-... Gates was a business shark before the trial. Absolutely ruthless. It’s hard to say how much of the changes are due to the court case, vs a changing technical landscape, vs the company growing to an enormous size, vs Gates simply getting older, but certainly after there were far fewer stories about his passion for crushing any company that might compete with him. And promising to support Office on the Mac after Jobs returned to Apple definitely smells of a response to anti-trust concerns, and it was critical at that point in time to Apple.

busterarm 7y ago

Probably what Google does every time they get some negative attention: Circle the wagons. It's also the worst thing that they can do, in this case.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]