3 ms·
The courts ruled that Microsoft should be broken up in 2000, and the case was settled without a breakup about a year later. The cases in the early 1990s were no
by twblalock 6y ago
The courts ruled that Microsoft should be broken up in 2000, and the case was settled without a breakup about a year later. The cases in the early 1990s were not even about the web browser, which did not exist yet -- they were about Windows licensing agreements from the 1980s.
- greedo 6y agoSo again, Chrome was released in 2008, seven years after the settlement. There was no ready alternative to Explorer at the time of the settlement.
- twblalock 6y agoNetscape Navigator and Communicator, Mozilla (the original one), and Opera all existed at the time and were trivially easy to obtain.
- greedo 6y agoNeither Netscape Navigator nor Opera were free. Mozilla took over a decade to become competitive. It wasn't until Safari and Chrome came along that there was any real competition to IE. IE was the web for a long long time.