4 ms·

Do you consider Microsoft's monopoly in the 90s to be maintained by the power of the government? Would that be different from the way that governments normally

Do you consider Microsoft's monopoly in the 90s to be maintained by the power of the government? Would that be different from the way that governments normally maintain a regulatory environment for businesses to expand? Can free market capitalism even exist without the property enforcement that what we'd consider as organized crime or governments provide?

injb 7y ago
Well my first response to this is that I understand "monopoly" to mean a single supplier. That is not the same thing as having a massive share of the market just because a huge majority of people prefer your product to the competition. I believe MS's main products in the 90s were Windows and Office. All these had alternatives (Mac OS or whatever it was called then, StarOffice etc, Lotus Notes etc.) Microsoft products were simply more popular. So what exactly did they have a monopoly on? My second point would be: monopoly or not, it's not clear that they would have maintained the advantage they had. Of course we know that the government intervened, and some people will say that's what broke MS's alleged monopoly, whlile others will say it made no difference, and still others will say that they couldn't have maintained it for long in a free market anyway. We'll never know, since it happened the way it happened, but personally I don't see how the government's actions made the success of Linux, Apple and Google products possible where they weren't before; therefore I find the last argument more convincing - that is, that Microsoft had the jump on everyone, but it was never going to last. A free market doesn't guarantee that there won't be a clear front runner in any given competition.