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I submit that had the lawsuit not started in May, then we would not have had the big announcements from Informix, Oracle and IBM. And during that explosion we w

I submit that had the lawsuit not started in May, then we would not have had the big announcements from Informix, Oracle and IBM. And during that explosion we would have seen dirty tricks from Microsoft to leverage their browser market into controlling the server as well. Of course, it's precisely their habit of using dirty tricks to force their way into new markets that got them into legal trouble in the first place, so there you go. On the other hand, Microsoft can do excellent work when faced with real competition, so in a counterfactual world where they never abused their monopoly position they may have won the browser and server markets anyway.

btilly 17y ago
Won the server markets? According to http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/06/17/june_2009_web_server_survey.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/06/17/june_2009_web_s... Microsoft is a solid #2 but Apache serves more than half of all domains, and more than half of the top million domains. It doesn't look like Microsoft won the server to me! That said, I don't know what would have happened without the monopoly abuse. Open source makes enough sense that it could have done well. However the meteoric rise in open source happened in large part because the whole industry was willing to do anything to make Microsoft lose. That is why everyone jumped on open source the second it became clear that Microsoft would be unable to retaliate for a bit. Therefore I suspect that open source would have eventually succeeded, but not as fast, and likely not in webserving.