6 ms·

Yes, Microsoft had 90% of the desktop OS marketplace, and did use that dominance to gain an edge in other markets. But despite that large market share, their le

by jsnell 3y ago

Yes, Microsoft had 90% of the desktop OS marketplace, and did use that dominance to gain an edge in other markets. But despite that large market share, their leverage was kind of limited by the platform being open. Apple, on the other hand, has unlimited technical leverage. They can make up whatever anti-competitive rule they want to, and enforce it totally. When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser. PC games are a >$50 billion market, with Microsoft only getting a small slice of that. That's because Microsoft wasn't just able to outlaw direct installs nor competing digital games stores. Games for Windows Live had to compete against e.g. Steam, with the predictable outcome. The size of the iOS gaming market is comparable. Apple collects a 30% cut of it, and will do so indefinitely. Competing with them is literally impossible; nobody else can make a different app store offering better terms or a better user experience. Apple is at around 60% market share in the US. The difference between 60% and 90% is a minor difference in scale. The difference between Apple's absolute control of iOS vs. the limited control that Microsoft had over Windows is a difference in kind. Apple got to choose whether competing software was even allowed on the platform. They could opening up special capabilities to only their own software, and actually enforce that (unlike Microsoft, whose undocumented APIs could still be reverse engineered). They can charge their competitors a 30% cut of revenue, while obviously ignoring it in their internal accounting for their own competing businesses.

evilduck 3y ago
At what point did Apple neglect Safari? They didn’t chase Google to implement features that solely benefit ChromeOS, but iPhones have completely dominated Android and any other browser engine for mobile rendering performance since the iPhone 4. A miserably slow browser that can receive push notifications is pointless.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Exactly. People claim Apple neglects Safari because its priorities are not aligned with Chrome's. Maybe not allowing a website to store GBs of data, run in the background or show notifications is a feature for some users.
  - naravara 3y ago
    It’s really only been in the past 3 years or so that I’ve started to see real pushback from Devs on Apple being overly pushy. Prior to that so many of the complaints were on the order of “Apple won’t allow me to do [insert insanely user-hostile or non-performant thing here] woe is me!”
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
      I've been a huge fan of Safari since its introduction. My only major complaint is that they replaced the old dev tools by this current atrocity which forces me use Chrome for development.
jwells89 3y ago
IE and Safari are vastly different situations. IE started off with near-total dominance and was truly left to rot, with the teams responsible for it having been scattered across the company because Microsoft was no longer concerned with cornering the market on web browsers. Safari on the other hand has only ever seen ~20% marketshare, has never been truly abandoned, and at least covers core competencies well (recall that IE couldn’t even handle transparent PNGs without DirectX filter hackery). IE made even basic static pages a pain to develop compared to Firefox, whereas most of Safari’s significant shortcomings have to do with more advanced functionalities. If Google got complacent and decided to reallocate nearly the entire Chrome and Blink teams to other projects leaving only tiny skeleton crews on them, allowing both Firefox/Gecko and Safari/WebKit to leave it in the dust in terms of features that would be almost a 1:1 analogue for the situation with Microsoft and IE back in the day.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Besides, IE was closed source and WebKIt is open source. So are all other engines. And web standards are really a thing now. The late 90s early 2000s were a dark period, software-wise. Nothing compares to that, thankfully. People either forget, weren't there or were just oblivious Windows users.
  - lakpan 3y ago
    > web standards are really a thing now. Chrome starts a proposal, implements it and “intends to ship” it before anyone really has time to discuss it. Recently (2 months ago?) they introduced a new WebExtension API that nobody cared about nor really understood the need for, but it’s still there, making it look like it’s a “standard”
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
      It’s far from perfect but no comparison to our lowest point in history.
  - Timon3 3y ago
    > Besides, IE was closed source and WebKIt is open source. So are all other engines. And web standards are really a thing now. Even today, this doesn't mean much if Apple decides to ignore web standards that are harmful to their business model. Web Notifications were implemented by Safari Desktop, Chrome Desktop and Firefox Desktop[0] in 2012 - and Safari Mobile in 2023. That's 9 years that a pretty useful and important API couldn't be relied on by PWAs. And this is just one of many examples. This has a real effect on what technologies developers can actually use, which is fairly similar to the effect IE6 had on newer APIs during its time. [0]: Chrome & Firefox desktop because I can't find a way to see historical dates for mobile on caniuse - but it was around that time, or a bit later, for mobile as well
jonhohle 3y ago
> Microsoft had 90% of the desktop OS marketplace As mentioned elsewhere, they didn’t get to 90% by selling to a free market. They demanded exclusivity across the entire PC market. They didn’t just let IE stagnate. They told Mosaic they would license their renderer for a percentage of sales and then gave IE away for free. It would be like Apple saying if you wrote an iOS app you couldn’t write an app for any other platform.
dangus 3y ago
The platform wasn’t “open.” Technologies like ActiveX were ways that Microsoft was trying to make the Internet depend on owning a Windows PC. Everything surrounding IE was an attempt to make other web browsers completely unviable. I don’t know if you remember how it was back then, but huge chunks of the Internet simply did not work if you weren’t using Internet Explorer. They would also sink your PC OEM business if you dared to ship a computer with an operating system alternative. They used their 90% marketshare to force companies like Dell to only sell computers with Windows installed. If someone like Dell wanted to provide an alternative like BeOS, Microsoft could terminate their contract or raise their royalty rate to unsustainable levels.
JimDabell 3y ago
> When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser. This isn’t even remotely true. The entire front-end web development ecosystem came to an absolute standstill in terms of browser support for five entire years because Microsoft decided that, since they had killed off the competition, they didn’t need to work on Internet Explorer any more. That’s five whole years without a single new release of Internet Explorer, which had >90% market share. And then after they restarted development, the next version mainly focused on adding tabs and a few CSS selectors. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 8 was released that it actually started to properly move forward again. But web developers still had to wait years before enough people had upgraded because Internet Explorer wasn’t evergreen and people didn’t upgrade very often. Supporting Internet Explorer 6 was still a battle developers were fighting in 2010, nine years after it was released. Apple releases new major versions of Safari with improved support for web standards every year like clockwork. And people upgrade promptly. And Apple take part in interop efforts with other browser vendors. The two situations are absolutely nothing alike.
ubermonkey 3y ago
>They can make up whatever anti-competitive rule they want to, and enforce it totally. On iOS, maybe. MacOS isn't controlled in that way. And, again, if you don't like iOS or Apple's rules, there's another completely viable OS you can use on mobile that actually has a larger global market share, so there's no monopoly play here.
no_wizard 3y ago
>When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it We have different definitions of long, and perhaps very different memories of the web from the years 2001-2012[0] almost a decade for any real traction for competing web browsers to put a dent in Microsoft, and that is after the anti-trust trial and the EU browser ballot mandate. Don't forget, it was so entrenched that even by 2015 IE had over 1/3 of browser share, really only defeated by Google Chrome (which had the infamous "kill IE" initiative[1]) in 2013 or there about. To put it simply, a decade of dominance is a long time. [0]: Data supports that Internet Explorer had majority market-share up through the first half of 2012 (globally), per https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2012 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid... and in North America, it held on to majority position through at least 2013. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-internet-explorer-6-kill-plot-engineer https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...
greedo 3y ago
You're comparing Microsoft's behavior now, after they've been smacked down in 1994 to how they operate now. MS had a long track record of breaking applications that competed with their offerings. If they hadn't been forced into the consent decree, they'd be 1)in a much stronger position than now, 2)behaving much worse. <When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser.> IE6 was released in 2001, after the consent decree. So the reason other browsers were able to compete was because MS couldn't kneecap them. <Apple is at around 60% market share in the US. The difference between 60% and 90% is a minor difference in scale.> 30% is a huge difference. <They can charge their competitors a 30% cut of revenue, while obviously ignoring it in their internal accounting for their own competing businesses.> What does MS charge game owners on Xbox? Sounds like the exact same thing. Xbox dominates the US console market [1] far more than iPhone does. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/console/north-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/console/north-ame...

by jsnell 3y ago

evilduck 3y ago

At what point did Apple neglect Safari? They didn’t chase Google to implement features that solely benefit ChromeOS, but iPhones have completely dominated Android and any other browser engine for mobile rendering performance since the iPhone 4. A miserably slow browser that can receive push notifications is pointless.

tambourine_man 3y ago
Exactly. People claim Apple neglects Safari because its priorities are not aligned with Chrome's. Maybe not allowing a website to store GBs of data, run in the background or show notifications is a feature for some users.
- naravara 3y ago
  It’s really only been in the past 3 years or so that I’ve started to see real pushback from Devs on Apple being overly pushy. Prior to that so many of the complaints were on the order of “Apple won’t allow me to do [insert insanely user-hostile or non-performant thing here] woe is me!”
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    I've been a huge fan of Safari since its introduction. My only major complaint is that they replaced the old dev tools by this current atrocity which forces me use Chrome for development.

jwells89 3y ago

IE and Safari are vastly different situations. IE started off with near-total dominance and was truly left to rot, with the teams responsible for it having been scattered across the company because Microsoft was no longer concerned with cornering the market on web browsers. Safari on the other hand has only ever seen ~20% marketshare, has never been truly abandoned, and at least covers core competencies well (recall that IE couldn’t even handle transparent PNGs without DirectX filter hackery). IE made even basic static pages a pain to develop compared to Firefox, whereas most of Safari’s significant shortcomings have to do with more advanced functionalities. If Google got complacent and decided to reallocate nearly the entire Chrome and Blink teams to other projects leaving only tiny skeleton crews on them, allowing both Firefox/Gecko and Safari/WebKit to leave it in the dust in terms of features that would be almost a 1:1 analogue for the situation with Microsoft and IE back in the day.

tambourine_man 3y ago
Besides, IE was closed source and WebKIt is open source. So are all other engines. And web standards are really a thing now. The late 90s early 2000s were a dark period, software-wise. Nothing compares to that, thankfully. People either forget, weren't there or were just oblivious Windows users.
- lakpan 3y ago
  > web standards are really a thing now. Chrome starts a proposal, implements it and “intends to ship” it before anyone really has time to discuss it. Recently (2 months ago?) they introduced a new WebExtension API that nobody cared about nor really understood the need for, but it’s still there, making it look like it’s a “standard”
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    It’s far from perfect but no comparison to our lowest point in history.
- Timon3 3y ago
  > Besides, IE was closed source and WebKIt is open source. So are all other engines. And web standards are really a thing now. Even today, this doesn't mean much if Apple decides to ignore web standards that are harmful to their business model. Web Notifications were implemented by Safari Desktop, Chrome Desktop and Firefox Desktop[0] in 2012 - and Safari Mobile in 2023. That's 9 years that a pretty useful and important API couldn't be relied on by PWAs. And this is just one of many examples. This has a real effect on what technologies developers can actually use, which is fairly similar to the effect IE6 had on newer APIs during its time. [0]: Chrome & Firefox desktop because I can't find a way to see historical dates for mobile on caniuse - but it was around that time, or a bit later, for mobile as well

jonhohle 3y ago

> Microsoft had 90% of the desktop OS marketplace As mentioned elsewhere, they didn’t get to 90% by selling to a free market. They demanded exclusivity across the entire PC market. They didn’t just let IE stagnate. They told Mosaic they would license their renderer for a percentage of sales and then gave IE away for free. It would be like Apple saying if you wrote an iOS app you couldn’t write an app for any other platform.

dangus 3y ago

The platform wasn’t “open.” Technologies like ActiveX were ways that Microsoft was trying to make the Internet depend on owning a Windows PC. Everything surrounding IE was an attempt to make other web browsers completely unviable. I don’t know if you remember how it was back then, but huge chunks of the Internet simply did not work if you weren’t using Internet Explorer. They would also sink your PC OEM business if you dared to ship a computer with an operating system alternative. They used their 90% marketshare to force companies like Dell to only sell computers with Windows installed. If someone like Dell wanted to provide an alternative like BeOS, Microsoft could terminate their contract or raise their royalty rate to unsustainable levels.

JimDabell 3y ago

> When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser. This isn’t even remotely true. The entire front-end web development ecosystem came to an absolute standstill in terms of browser support for five entire years because Microsoft decided that, since they had killed off the competition, they didn’t need to work on Internet Explorer any more. That’s five whole years without a single new release of Internet Explorer, which had >90% market share. And then after they restarted development, the next version mainly focused on adding tabs and a few CSS selectors. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 8 was released that it actually started to properly move forward again. But web developers still had to wait years before enough people had upgraded because Internet Explorer wasn’t evergreen and people didn’t upgrade very often. Supporting Internet Explorer 6 was still a battle developers were fighting in 2010, nine years after it was released. Apple releases new major versions of Safari with improved support for web standards every year like clockwork. And people upgrade promptly. And Apple take part in interop efforts with other browser vendors. The two situations are absolutely nothing alike.

ubermonkey 3y ago

>They can make up whatever anti-competitive rule they want to, and enforce it totally. On iOS, maybe. MacOS isn't controlled in that way. And, again, if you don't like iOS or Apple's rules, there's another completely viable OS you can use on mobile that actually has a larger global market share, so there's no monopoly play here.

no_wizard 3y ago

>When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it We have different definitions of long, and perhaps very different memories of the web from the years 2001-2012[0] almost a decade for any real traction for competing web browsers to put a dent in Microsoft, and that is after the anti-trust trial and the EU browser ballot mandate. Don't forget, it was so entrenched that even by 2015 IE had over 1/3 of browser share, really only defeated by Google Chrome (which had the infamous "kill IE" initiative[1]) in 2013 or there about. To put it simply, a decade of dominance is a long time. [0]: Data supports that Internet Explorer had majority market-share up through the first half of 2012 (globally), per https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2012 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid... and in North America, it held on to majority position through at least 2013. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-internet-explorer-6-kill-plot-engineer https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...

greedo 3y ago

You're comparing Microsoft's behavior now, after they've been smacked down in 1994 to how they operate now. MS had a long track record of breaking applications that competed with their offerings. If they hadn't been forced into the consent decree, they'd be 1)in a much stronger position than now, 2)behaving much worse. <When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser.> IE6 was released in 2001, after the consent decree. So the reason other browsers were able to compete was because MS couldn't kneecap them. <Apple is at around 60% market share in the US. The difference between 60% and 90% is a minor difference in scale.> 30% is a huge difference. <They can charge their competitors a 30% cut of revenue, while obviously ignoring it in their internal accounting for their own competing businesses.> What does MS charge game owners on Xbox? Sounds like the exact same thing. Xbox dominates the US console market [1] far more than iPhone does. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/console/north-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/console/north-ame...