5 ms·

The article massively overstates the impact of the 1998 Microsift trial. What Microsoft got was a slap on the wrist that they considered just a cost of doing bu

by btilly 3y ago

The article massively overstates the impact of the 1998 Microsift trial. What Microsoft got was a slap on the wrist that they considered just a cost of doing business. Netscape died, and Microsoft's behavior remained the same. Microsoft didn't blink until acround 2008 when the EU cases finally fined them enough that they blinked. See, for example, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-eu/eu-fines-microsoft-record-1-35-billion-idUSL2775856920080227 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-eu/eu-fines-mic....

jojobas 3y ago
He's talking about humiliation from dragging Microsoft's and Bill Gates personal brands in the dirt, not actual penalty adjudicated. Basically if we had videos of Pichai stuttering and unsuccessfully trying to weasel out of sharp questions in every news report for a couple of weeks that would perhaps open more eyes and hurt Google more than a fine of so many zeroes.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
  > > He's talking about humiliation from dragging Microsoft's and Bill Gates personal brands in the dirt, not actual penalty adjudicated. Yeah, like Trump's Access Hollywood tape... At that huge scale whatever topic except for maybe CP ends up becoming a 50-50 split with fans loving the character and his brand even more and haters conversely hating it even more too. That's because when people that you normally hate side against [insert divisive character] then the choice is to automatically jump on his bandwagon and viceversa. So at such scales it rapidly escalates to a 50-50 split or thereabout. The best you can do is to have some sort of marginal victory against the character in a winner take all settings (such as an election or a supreme court ruling) and hope it demoralizes him. Like when Trump lost the Presidency he was demoralized and disappeared for a while, but had he kept his morale high he'd have been the Monday Morning armchair shadow President critiquing and undermining everything Biden did from his Twitter account addressing to the 70M people who voted for him
  - passwordoops 3y ago
    I generally agree with you, but distaste for tech giants is one place where there does seem to be overlap across the left-right political-sport dichotomy. This falls more along class lines and can easily be equated with the Sacklers not being punished, government corruption going unpunished, etc
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > that would perhaps open more eyes and hurt Google more than a fine of so many zeroes. Because that definitely worked with Microsoft, right? I don't think most Americans could tell you what Netscape is, let alone why Microsoft was sued or why it should have been humiliating.
  - rashkov 3y ago
    As per the article, the significance is that Microsoft did not use its platform dominance to crush an upstart google
    - btilly 3y ago
      I understood it very differently at the time. Microsoft felt that it had won the browser wars so thoroughly that they dismantled most of their IE team and took their eyes off the ball. Nobody else could make a competitive browser, and therefore nobody could add browser features that would undermine the importance of Windows for applications. They didn't realize that they already had added the key feature for the Outlook team. The first real use of XMLHttpRequest was Gmail in 2004. Most people just thought of it as a cute trick. It wasn't until Google Maps and the coining of the term AJAX that people thought differently. Microsoft, of course, had already been hit with the 2004 EU decree, and kept its eyes off the ball. By the time Microsoft paid attention, everyone was using it, Firefox was competitive with IE, Safari wasn't too far behind, and Google was already working on Chrome. But by then it was too late. Microsoft didn't have the IE team, and had been shocked at the EU penalties. Therefore I give the credit for Microsoft not crushing Google to the EU antitrust, and not the USA antitrust. Which really did have no teeth. As can be seen by their efforts to anticompetitively promote Windows Media Player.
      - no_wizard 3y ago
        Funny enough, XMLHttpRequest[0] was conceived because Microsoft needed to build out a web client for Exchange[1], which was a precursor to Gmail in many ways. In absolute terms, Gmail had more users and showcased the possibilities of web apps more broadly, however Outlook for the web in 2001-2004 was pretty sophisticated for its time [0]: Though it was called ActiveXObject for a time [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090130092236/http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20090130092236/http://www.alexho...
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  That's an argument for extrajudicial punishment though. If anything, that's an argument in favor of sealing the court. There are good reasons to have open proceedings but providing the public more opportunities to spin sound bites into hate-mobbing isn't one of them.
- throwaway-blaze 3y ago
  This is the largest reason behind Bill stepping back and ultimately completely retiring from Microsoft. Despite his nerdy exterior, he has quite an ego, and didn't like being portrayed that way.
fourthark 3y ago
It was the exposure of Microsoft's business practices to daylight that had the greatest effect, IMO.
- btilly 3y ago
  If that had a great effect, why did they continue violating antitrust law in the ways documented in the EU? It wasn't like their antitrust history started with browsers. Their business practices were on display before - for instance look at the 1994 consent decree that they signed. Or did you think that Netscape was their first antitrust case?
  - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    I think it had a huge effect on changing the practices of their potential consumers. I'm aware that Microsoft and Google still have massive marketshare, but there's no way of knowing what the world would look like if that lawsuit hadn't happened. They technically lost in the legal court, but internally may have been congratulating themselves because the penalty was so small. But they lost in the court of public opinion. "Everyone knows" that Microsoft's modus operandi is "Embrace, extend, extinguish" monopoly-building, that IE sucks, that their entire platform is anti-user...it's taken decades of brilliant work on VS Code, on the .NET stack, and in other open source efforts to partially convince some of the developer community that they're not entirely evil. And honestly, Microsoft's character in all of this is a big part of why I daily Firefox on a Linux laptop, and probably a big part of why tools like Firefox and Linux exist. A significant portion of Google's success may be due to people leaving Microsoft's IE (and Bing) and using Chrome instead! Here, "Don't be evil" Google - already somewhat maligned by their Adsense tracking cookies, their gradual degradation of the Search experience, their habit of canceling beloved projects, their own embrace/extend/extinguish model with Chrome, and their other actions, could suffer a similar character impeachment in this antitrust trial. It doesn't matter as much whether industry insiders knew what their behavior was, or whether they take a financial hit, or even whether they're found guilty - what matters most is what popular culture paints them to be.
    - 3y ago
chung8123 3y ago
That is hard to predict and would be a rewrite of history. Microsoft operated their business with handcuffs for years and it definitely allowed Apple to make a lot of advances in bundling things that Microsoft was too scared to do.
no_wizard 3y ago
I remember this. This started a wave of lobbying and PR campaigns from industry groups that lasted until ~2013 or so stating that the EU was going to use its leverage its power to "issue fines to extract the wealth of American tech companies because there aren't enough European ones". Worded more eloquently (though I can't recall exactly how, I think they may have said something about the "EU Technology Tax" or something as an allusion to this), but never the less, its what they were conveying This was targeted at gaining sympathy for the US government to intervene with the EU to make it more friendly for American tech companies, and more specifically, big ones. I wish I could find the webpage ads I saw around this. It was not a good look.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  Isn't that basically what is happening though? The EU still doesn't have (almost) any big tech companies, and they still regularly issue 9 or 10 figure fines to US tech companies.
  - josephg 3y ago
    > they still regularly issue 9 or 10 figure fines to US tech companies. Its not a conspiracy. US tech companies just keep blatantly disobeying EU law regarding personal data. A few years ago GDPR fines were so low many companies just paid them rather than comply with the law. It makes sense if the fines are much bigger now - large fines are (apparently) needed to bring companies to heel. If you want to avoid the fines, try complying with the law. I know people complain about the GDPR, but the requirements seems much less obnoxious to me than what adtech companies keep doing. I don't want facebook and friends to track me all over the web and sell that information to the highest bidder. I'm with the EU - these practices should be illegal.
    - earthboundkid 3y ago
      My problem is that GDPR/Cookie laws don't go far enough. If you can get out of the law by showing an obnoxious banner, it's not helping anyone. It should just be illegal to use behavior data to show ads to people, period. We had a systems that worked for 100 years based on general demographics, and they worked fine. Show me an ad based on the fact hat I'm reading TechCrunch, not based on the fact that I was Googling "broken lawnmower hand reach blade bolt safe??" two minutes ago.
dredmorbius 3y ago
Whilst I'd agree strongly that the courts exacted far less severe a penalty than they could have, or IMO should have, based on the Findings of Fact in the case, the point remains that Microsoft post trial was far less feared or effective than it had been previously. It was in 2007 that the founder of this site and its associated venture capital wrote "Microsoft is Dead": Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared. But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous. <http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770> Of course, Microsoft did not in fact die, and it remains part of FAANG (or MAAMA, or whatever we're calling them these days), but the company did see a substantial decline by any number of measures (fear, market cap, reputation, market domination) through the aughts and well into the teens. Google and Facebook and Amazon emerged, Apple (all but dead itself by the late 1990s) had one of the most phenomenal come-backs of any company ever. And when we talk of market domination today, the first names off peoples lips or fingertips are more likely Google and Facebook and Amazon than Microsoft. It's their market spaces which are most resistant to serious rivalry, whilst Microsoft scrambles for the scraps of desktop and tries to establish itself in the Cloud. The areas it had tried to dominate: commerce, Web search, handhelds, and even office software, are owned, or at least strongly contested (in the last instance) by others. I'm not saying that Microsoft is redeemed (I don't think it is), or that it's well behaved (dittos). But the unrestrained malevolence it exhibited through the mid-1990s is mostly tamped down strongly.

by btilly 3y ago

jojobas 3y ago

He's talking about humiliation from dragging Microsoft's and Bill Gates personal brands in the dirt, not actual penalty adjudicated. Basically if we had videos of Pichai stuttering and unsuccessfully trying to weasel out of sharp questions in every news report for a couple of weeks that would perhaps open more eyes and hurt Google more than a fine of so many zeroes.

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
> > He's talking about humiliation from dragging Microsoft's and Bill Gates personal brands in the dirt, not actual penalty adjudicated. Yeah, like Trump's Access Hollywood tape... At that huge scale whatever topic except for maybe CP ends up becoming a 50-50 split with fans loving the character and his brand even more and haters conversely hating it even more too. That's because when people that you normally hate side against [insert divisive character] then the choice is to automatically jump on his bandwagon and viceversa. So at such scales it rapidly escalates to a 50-50 split or thereabout. The best you can do is to have some sort of marginal victory against the character in a winner take all settings (such as an election or a supreme court ruling) and hope it demoralizes him. Like when Trump lost the Presidency he was demoralized and disappeared for a while, but had he kept his morale high he'd have been the Monday Morning armchair shadow President critiquing and undermining everything Biden did from his Twitter account addressing to the 70M people who voted for him
- passwordoops 3y ago
  I generally agree with you, but distaste for tech giants is one place where there does seem to be overlap across the left-right political-sport dichotomy. This falls more along class lines and can easily be equated with the Sacklers not being punished, government corruption going unpunished, etc
smoldesu 3y ago
> that would perhaps open more eyes and hurt Google more than a fine of so many zeroes. Because that definitely worked with Microsoft, right? I don't think most Americans could tell you what Netscape is, let alone why Microsoft was sued or why it should have been humiliating.
- rashkov 3y ago
  As per the article, the significance is that Microsoft did not use its platform dominance to crush an upstart google
  - btilly 3y ago
    I understood it very differently at the time. Microsoft felt that it had won the browser wars so thoroughly that they dismantled most of their IE team and took their eyes off the ball. Nobody else could make a competitive browser, and therefore nobody could add browser features that would undermine the importance of Windows for applications. They didn't realize that they already had added the key feature for the Outlook team. The first real use of XMLHttpRequest was Gmail in 2004. Most people just thought of it as a cute trick. It wasn't until Google Maps and the coining of the term AJAX that people thought differently. Microsoft, of course, had already been hit with the 2004 EU decree, and kept its eyes off the ball. By the time Microsoft paid attention, everyone was using it, Firefox was competitive with IE, Safari wasn't too far behind, and Google was already working on Chrome. But by then it was too late. Microsoft didn't have the IE team, and had been shocked at the EU penalties. Therefore I give the credit for Microsoft not crushing Google to the EU antitrust, and not the USA antitrust. Which really did have no teeth. As can be seen by their efforts to anticompetitively promote Windows Media Player.
    - no_wizard 3y ago
      Funny enough, XMLHttpRequest[0] was conceived because Microsoft needed to build out a web client for Exchange[1], which was a precursor to Gmail in many ways. In absolute terms, Gmail had more users and showcased the possibilities of web apps more broadly, however Outlook for the web in 2001-2004 was pretty sophisticated for its time [0]: Though it was called ActiveXObject for a time [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090130092236/http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20090130092236/http://www.alexho...
shadowgovt 3y ago
That's an argument for extrajudicial punishment though. If anything, that's an argument in favor of sealing the court. There are good reasons to have open proceedings but providing the public more opportunities to spin sound bites into hate-mobbing isn't one of them.
throwaway-blaze 3y ago
This is the largest reason behind Bill stepping back and ultimately completely retiring from Microsoft. Despite his nerdy exterior, he has quite an ego, and didn't like being portrayed that way.

fourthark 3y ago

It was the exposure of Microsoft's business practices to daylight that had the greatest effect, IMO.

btilly 3y ago
If that had a great effect, why did they continue violating antitrust law in the ways documented in the EU? It wasn't like their antitrust history started with browsers. Their business practices were on display before - for instance look at the 1994 consent decree that they signed. Or did you think that Netscape was their first antitrust case?
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  I think it had a huge effect on changing the practices of their potential consumers. I'm aware that Microsoft and Google still have massive marketshare, but there's no way of knowing what the world would look like if that lawsuit hadn't happened. They technically lost in the legal court, but internally may have been congratulating themselves because the penalty was so small. But they lost in the court of public opinion. "Everyone knows" that Microsoft's modus operandi is "Embrace, extend, extinguish" monopoly-building, that IE sucks, that their entire platform is anti-user...it's taken decades of brilliant work on VS Code, on the .NET stack, and in other open source efforts to partially convince some of the developer community that they're not entirely evil. And honestly, Microsoft's character in all of this is a big part of why I daily Firefox on a Linux laptop, and probably a big part of why tools like Firefox and Linux exist. A significant portion of Google's success may be due to people leaving Microsoft's IE (and Bing) and using Chrome instead! Here, "Don't be evil" Google - already somewhat maligned by their Adsense tracking cookies, their gradual degradation of the Search experience, their habit of canceling beloved projects, their own embrace/extend/extinguish model with Chrome, and their other actions, could suffer a similar character impeachment in this antitrust trial. It doesn't matter as much whether industry insiders knew what their behavior was, or whether they take a financial hit, or even whether they're found guilty - what matters most is what popular culture paints them to be.
  - 3y ago

chung8123 3y ago

That is hard to predict and would be a rewrite of history. Microsoft operated their business with handcuffs for years and it definitely allowed Apple to make a lot of advances in bundling things that Microsoft was too scared to do.

no_wizard 3y ago

I remember this. This started a wave of lobbying and PR campaigns from industry groups that lasted until ~2013 or so stating that the EU was going to use its leverage its power to "issue fines to extract the wealth of American tech companies because there aren't enough European ones". Worded more eloquently (though I can't recall exactly how, I think they may have said something about the "EU Technology Tax" or something as an allusion to this), but never the less, its what they were conveying This was targeted at gaining sympathy for the US government to intervene with the EU to make it more friendly for American tech companies, and more specifically, big ones. I wish I could find the webpage ads I saw around this. It was not a good look.

sebzim4500 3y ago
Isn't that basically what is happening though? The EU still doesn't have (almost) any big tech companies, and they still regularly issue 9 or 10 figure fines to US tech companies.
- josephg 3y ago
  > they still regularly issue 9 or 10 figure fines to US tech companies. Its not a conspiracy. US tech companies just keep blatantly disobeying EU law regarding personal data. A few years ago GDPR fines were so low many companies just paid them rather than comply with the law. It makes sense if the fines are much bigger now - large fines are (apparently) needed to bring companies to heel. If you want to avoid the fines, try complying with the law. I know people complain about the GDPR, but the requirements seems much less obnoxious to me than what adtech companies keep doing. I don't want facebook and friends to track me all over the web and sell that information to the highest bidder. I'm with the EU - these practices should be illegal.
  - earthboundkid 3y ago
    My problem is that GDPR/Cookie laws don't go far enough. If you can get out of the law by showing an obnoxious banner, it's not helping anyone. It should just be illegal to use behavior data to show ads to people, period. We had a systems that worked for 100 years based on general demographics, and they worked fine. Show me an ad based on the fact hat I'm reading TechCrunch, not based on the fact that I was Googling "broken lawnmower hand reach blade bolt safe??" two minutes ago.

dredmorbius 3y ago

Whilst I'd agree strongly that the courts exacted far less severe a penalty than they could have, or IMO should have, based on the Findings of Fact in the case, the point remains that Microsoft post trial was far less feared or effective than it had been previously. It was in 2007 that the founder of this site and its associated venture capital wrote "Microsoft is Dead": Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared. But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous. <http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770> Of course, Microsoft did not in fact die, and it remains part of FAANG (or MAAMA, or whatever we're calling them these days), but the company did see a substantial decline by any number of measures (fear, market cap, reputation, market domination) through the aughts and well into the teens. Google and Facebook and Amazon emerged, Apple (all but dead itself by the late 1990s) had one of the most phenomenal come-backs of any company ever. And when we talk of market domination today, the first names off peoples lips or fingertips are more likely Google and Facebook and Amazon than Microsoft. It's their market spaces which are most resistant to serious rivalry, whilst Microsoft scrambles for the scraps of desktop and tries to establish itself in the Cloud. The areas it had tried to dominate: commerce, Web search, handhelds, and even office software, are owned, or at least strongly contested (in the last instance) by others. I'm not saying that Microsoft is redeemed (I don't think it is), or that it's well behaved (dittos). But the unrestrained malevolence it exhibited through the mid-1990s is mostly tamped down strongly.