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It's impossible to conclude from the evidence presented that the antitrust action had no effect on the breaking down of Microsoft's monopoly. It's entirely pla
by rdw 14y ago
It's impossible to conclude from the evidence presented that the antitrust action had no effect on the breaking down of Microsoft's monopoly. It's entirely plausible that the enforcement left them unable to respond as quickly to new markets as their competitors, leading to them beginning to get undermined a few years later. Abusing their monopoly in the PC OS market to get advantages in unrelated markets was in many complaints against Microsoft at the time.
It's entirely within reason to believe that had the Justice Department not been breathing down their necks that Microsoft would have used its monopolies to illegally squash the original iPod. There are plenty of examples of products that were well-made, innovative, and desired but didn't make a major market impact for poorly-understood reasons (WebOS comes to mind). It's not at all obvious that the iPod was bound to succeed; if all those amorphous outside factors hadn't gone its way, we could be sitting around discussing how the iPod was a repeat of the Newton, and how inevitable it was that Microsoft finally cracked the the MP3 market with Plays4Sure.
- azakai 14y ago> It's impossible to conclude from the evidence presented that the antitrust action had no effect on the breaking down of Microsoft's monopoly. It's entirely plausible that the enforcement left them unable to respond as quickly to new markets as their competitors, leading to them beginning to get undermined a few years later. In fact, companies targeted by antitrust (I think it was IBM) have stated that antitrust regulation, by itself, shifted their focus. You are no longer rushing ahead, instead you must be cautious about everything. So it is indeed quite plausible that antitrust actions against Microsoft made possible the current non-Microsoft-dominated era.
- dougabug 14y agoApple was on life support during the mid-90's. Microsoft nearly killed the Mac with its unimaginative imitator, Windows, but probably held off from killing Apple completely because of the Antitrust case hovering over it. Many if not most of the early personal computer software companies were driven out of business by Microsoft.