4 ms·
> The sort of ironic footnote in drawing a comparison to the Microsoft case is that while bundling IE with Windows killed Netscape's commercial prospects and it
by nodamage 6y ago
> The sort of ironic footnote in drawing a comparison to the Microsoft case is that while bundling IE with Windows killed Netscape's commercial prospects and it was certainly done with malice aforethought, it was also fundamentally the right call.
It's also worth noting this was never actually ruled to be illegal. The appeals court remanded the question back to the district court for further analysis under the rule of reason, but that never actually happened as the case was eventually settled. Under the rule of reason, Microsoft would have been able to argue that it had legitimate justification for bundling a browser with Windows, and then it would have been up to the DOJ to argue that the anticompetitive effect of the bundling outweighed the justification given. I think Microsoft would have had a relatively strong argument there, as an operating system that shipped without a web browser (or media player, for that matter) would have been, in fact, less useful to the consumer.
- chipotle_coyote 6y agoThat's true, and a good point. I dimly remember thinking at the time that the browser was the wrong focus for this whole endeavor -- if there was anything Microsoft was doing that was legitimately shady, it was relating to some of their OEM agreements, which I (admittedly now fuzzily) recall had some terms in them which were pretty clearly meant to stifle competition with Windows. IIRC, you weren't allowed to ship computers that dual-booted Windows and another OS, for instance; if Windows was pre-installed it had to be the only OS. And if you shipped any computers that had Windows pre-installed, your OEM license was based on the number of total computers you shipped whether or not Windows was installed on all of them, e.g., if you sold 50 computers and only 30 of them had Windows pre-installed, you paid for 50 licenses.