4 ms·

> You don’t need aggressive antitrust enforcement to kill them — just wait a while for the march of progress and the innovator’s dilemma to rear their heads. T

> You don’t need aggressive antitrust enforcement to kill them — just wait a while for the march of progress and the innovator’s dilemma to rear their heads. This is not what happens. Take Microsoft. It's now 25 years since the antitrust case against them, but since it never actually broke them up, they still have 70% desktop market share and the experience of Windows users continues to degrade over time. You can say that they lost the mobile market, but that doesn't help anyone still using a PC for work, or stuck with Windows-only software. A new market may outgrow them, but the old market still exists, and why should we want those users to continue to be screwed? Moreover, the thesis here is that the monopolies are beneficial until they enter the value extraction phase and turn on their customers. But in that case why wouldn't you want to break them up as soon as they do? No need to preserve them after that, their contribution has been made and it's time to smash them to bits so the corpse of what was once greatness can't be commandeered by sociopaths.

_heimdall 2y ago
I don't recall the Microsoft antitrust case having been about breaking the company up though. The issue at hand was that one company shouldn't ship a web browser preinstalled in the OS, not that the same company shouldn't make both an OS and a web browser.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  The initial judgment called for breaking up Microsoft. That was overturned on appeal. (Yes, the case was about Microsoft using OS dominance to dominate the browser market, but breaking up Microsoft was the initial remedy.)
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Oh that's really interesting, not sure how I lost that fact to the sands of time. Thanks!
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Microsoft has 70% desktop market share? They once had 95%. There are real alternatives now, alternatives that are generally supported and that interoperate with everything else. You don't have to be marginalized to use a non-Microsoft desktop. But, more to the point, consider Sun's motto: "The network is the computer". The action isn't on desktop apps any more. "Computing" is primarily done online, not via locally-running apps. So which OS you run makes little real difference. And more and more of that network access is via phones rather than PCs. The PC OS makes even less difference when you're not using a PC. The Microsoft antitrust case meant that Microsoft couldn't use its desktop dominance to control the browser (and thereby control the Web). When they lost that case, they lost their ability to control the future. It was a really big deal. The entire internet would not be a Microsoft-controlled walled garden.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Microsoft has 70% desktop market share? They once had 95%. And that's the point. It took 25 years from them to drop from 95% to 70%. It happens, but it's not fast. And that's a long time for things to be in a bad way. > There are real alternatives now, alternatives that are generally supported and that interoperate with everything else. You don't have to be marginalized to use a non-Microsoft desktop. Which is why it's 70% instead of 95%. But if you've actually used both modern Windows and modern Linux, you might notice that one has ads on the start menu, keeps pushing Microsoft apps and services on you even if you prefer alternatives and heavily pressures you to sign in with a Microsoft account, etc. It's a fairly hostile experience. And, sure, some people are actually switching. I've heard more people saying they're going to dump Windows 11 for Linux this year than in the ten years prior combined. But there still plenty of people stuck with it. They have legacy software that isn't supported well or at all on other platforms, or their company is all in on Active Directory and Microsoft Office and those things don't work as well on other platforms but take a big one-time effort to switch away from once they're entangled with your business. Now suppose there were a dozen companies that had a license to modify and sell Windows, like there had been with Unix. They'd all support legacy Win32 apps but the first one that tried to put ads on the start menu would lose customers to the others. Then they'd start to diverge from each other, so there would be a call to create a compatibility layer so developers could target all of them, which would end up being something like Qt or GTK that can also target Linux and Mac, only all the developers would use it instead of a minority. One of the Micro Bells might go for an open source strategy, and then you get the Windows equivalent of BSD, forcing the others to innovate to gain an advantage. Back in the day people would use Solaris specifically for ZFS and things, even when BSD was free. What would be the downside of this, compared to what we have now?

_heimdall 2y ago

I don't recall the Microsoft antitrust case having been about breaking the company up though. The issue at hand was that one company shouldn't ship a web browser preinstalled in the OS, not that the same company shouldn't make both an OS and a web browser.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
The initial judgment called for breaking up Microsoft. That was overturned on appeal. (Yes, the case was about Microsoft using OS dominance to dominate the browser market, but breaking up Microsoft was the initial remedy.)
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Oh that's really interesting, not sure how I lost that fact to the sands of time. Thanks!

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

Microsoft has 70% desktop market share? They once had 95%. There are real alternatives now, alternatives that are generally supported and that interoperate with everything else. You don't have to be marginalized to use a non-Microsoft desktop. But, more to the point, consider Sun's motto: "The network is the computer". The action isn't on desktop apps any more. "Computing" is primarily done online, not via locally-running apps. So which OS you run makes little real difference. And more and more of that network access is via phones rather than PCs. The PC OS makes even less difference when you're not using a PC. The Microsoft antitrust case meant that Microsoft couldn't use its desktop dominance to control the browser (and thereby control the Web). When they lost that case, they lost their ability to control the future. It was a really big deal. The entire internet would not be a Microsoft-controlled walled garden.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> Microsoft has 70% desktop market share? They once had 95%. And that's the point. It took 25 years from them to drop from 95% to 70%. It happens, but it's not fast. And that's a long time for things to be in a bad way. > There are real alternatives now, alternatives that are generally supported and that interoperate with everything else. You don't have to be marginalized to use a non-Microsoft desktop. Which is why it's 70% instead of 95%. But if you've actually used both modern Windows and modern Linux, you might notice that one has ads on the start menu, keeps pushing Microsoft apps and services on you even if you prefer alternatives and heavily pressures you to sign in with a Microsoft account, etc. It's a fairly hostile experience. And, sure, some people are actually switching. I've heard more people saying they're going to dump Windows 11 for Linux this year than in the ten years prior combined. But there still plenty of people stuck with it. They have legacy software that isn't supported well or at all on other platforms, or their company is all in on Active Directory and Microsoft Office and those things don't work as well on other platforms but take a big one-time effort to switch away from once they're entangled with your business. Now suppose there were a dozen companies that had a license to modify and sell Windows, like there had been with Unix. They'd all support legacy Win32 apps but the first one that tried to put ads on the start menu would lose customers to the others. Then they'd start to diverge from each other, so there would be a call to create a compatibility layer so developers could target all of them, which would end up being something like Qt or GTK that can also target Linux and Mac, only all the developers would use it instead of a minority. One of the Micro Bells might go for an open source strategy, and then you get the Windows equivalent of BSD, forcing the others to innovate to gain an advantage. Back in the day people would use Solaris specifically for ZFS and things, even when BSD was free. What would be the downside of this, compared to what we have now?