Microsoft also destroyed every competitor they had.
They sent Lotus 1-2-3 and Visicalc packing. They destroyed WordStar and WordPerfect. Lotus Notes, Groupwise? Gone. They destroyed Novell. IBM couldn't even sell software for DOS/Windows. Borland? History. Netscape? See ya.
The only people safe from Microsoft's wrath were companies like Adobe.
And communism wipes out all private companies completely replacing them with monolithic state monopolies.
But in the case at hand it was a bit more than ‘the game’. MS broke the law multiple times and were at minimum deeply unethical in several other cases, and were held to account for it. Not enough in my opinion, but it was there.
Ultimately though they also made the right moves at the right times and their competitors didn’t.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that it's not against the law to be a monopoly, but it is against the law to abuse one's monopoly position.
What I'm hazy on is whether antitrust enforcement defendants are informed by the government that they're a monopoly prior to being charged with abusing said monopoly.
Is that the case, or no?
Did Microsoft break any laws that it wouldn't have broken had the government not decided that they were a monopoly?
Capitalism doesn't mean you can't have regulations and enforcement. Microsoft used every dirty tactic in the book to wipe out its competitors, and the government turned a blind eye till it was way too late.
If someone from the 80s or 90s got a time machine and skipped to today, one of their biggest surprises would be that Bill Gates is considered a beloved philanthropist rather than the personification of corporate evil.
A lot of the competitors shit the bed. WordPerfect basically handed the market over by focusing on a bunch of random programs and letting Microsoft take over the windows market.
Microsoft had the jump on WordPerfect when it came to getting a word processor on Windows. By Windows I mean windows 3.1, 3.11, the versions that worked and were bought with bundled MS software.
Furthermore WordPerfect people were touch typists, users of function keys. In previous times these people were the typing pool. Now we don't have typing pools, managers and others that would have used secretaries worked out they could do okay by themselves in MS Word with its toolbar buttons to embolden text etc.
Sadly the touch typing WordPerfect crew that had ensured the DOS years didn't really make it to the new GUI ways of working. Their muscle memory and need to keep the fingers on the keyboard kept them at the WordPerfect level of working, much like how you have programmers using 'vim' instead of a modern GUI like 'Notepad', there was no perceived improvement.
I remember how lame the Wordperfect for Windows was, it was not performant and the last thing you need with a word processor is that feeling your computer could BSOD any moment. It was all wrong for the Windows world but, as mentioned, Microsoft had the jump on that, they could even build in features to Wondows to support what would become Office if need be, Wordperfect didn't have that under the hood access.
> Microsoft used every dirty tactic in the book to wipe out its competitors, and the government turned a blind eye till it was way too late.
> If someone from the 80s or 90s got a time machine and skipped to today, one of their biggest surprises would be that Bill Gates is considered a beloved philanthropist rather than the personification of corporate evil.
The problem rather is that people have a short memory. I for myself have not forgotten.
Capitalism is about reserving a quantity of production to be used in future production. That is, accruing capital, specifically as a factor of production.
The game Microsoft played was one of enclosures, monopoly-building, corporate warfare, bordering on corporate fraticide, and engrossment.
Mind, that's a fairly standard game across a whole slew of economic activities, within which I'm looking for (and seem to be finding) some common grounds. Software, operating systems, hardware platforms (chipsets), communications networks, broadcasting, print media, copyright cartels, transportation (road, rail, sea, canal, air), and the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors all seem to share that certain je ne sais quois.
It is how monopolies, fueled and protected by copyright and patent laws, who themselves are breaking the laws (anti competitive), work. You see, being a monopoly isn't against the law but abusing your overly dominant market position is.
> Lidl and Aldi did the same in Europe.
(There's no such thing as Aldi. There's Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud [0])
Hi, I'm from Europe. Aldi has 431 stores in The Netherlands, Albert Heijn 947. And that's probably nothing compared to what Superunie owns. [1] UK is a similar story. Lidl and Aldi are nowhere near the market share of Co-op or Tesco. [2] So... what did Lidl and Aldi do in Europe? Lidl or Aldi are nothing even close to a monopolist. Wall Mart is huge, but has healthy competition as well. [3]
Microsoft had virtually no competition in the desktop OS market from mid to late 90s until recent due to tablets and ChromeOS finally becoming a competitor. That actively stiffened the innovation on desktop in other related areas such as the browser market where everyone had to run dirty hacks in HTML and CSS to adhere to the defacto standard called MSIE. It was a horrible cesspit where the only browser you could reliably use only ran on one OS (Windows) and was also terribly insecure. And hey, it used to run on different OSes but Microsoft decided to quit those ports. The port they maintained the longest was for that 1% market share company "we're not a monopoly excuse cause Apple".
We didn't mention Intel yet. They're an entire different subject, another parasite who run in symbiosis with the monster of the 90s and 00s called Microsoft (or Mammon ;)
[4]). Microsoft lies dormant now, as the market it had previously in complete control is marginalized by iOS and Android. Thank you, Apple and Google. And we shouldn't forget the wonderful work by KHTML/Konqueror team (which spawned Safari and Chrome), or Mozilla (and formerly Netscape) who initially was the dominant competitor of Microsoft in the browser space.
Microsoft got on the boards of banks that their competitors used, then called in the loans, pulling the rug out from under their competitors.
Microsoft used astroturfing campaigns in newspapers and magazines talking up their products and talking down their competitors. These tactics are much more widely known today, primarily because MS.
Microsoft created all kinds of undocumented apis that enabled their products to function much better than the competition. This is illegal for monopolists to do. IBM was forced to document all of their OS APIs because they were a monopoly, so that application developers would be on the same level and able to compete with IBM.
Microsoft changed apis and functionality that somehow always seemed to break their competitors products, but not their own.
Microsoft dominated to such an extent, that they essentially were forced to bail out Apple so that they could have a fig leaf excuse that they weren't actually a monopoly.
all of those companies could also be said to have killed themselves either by making crappy products or not reading the direction of the industry.
Lotus notes: some good ideas but horrible outdated app
wordperfect/wordstar: not even close to matching MS Word's feature or ease of use
Novell: what did they make other than networking that ended up being a standard part of all machines and all OSes, not just windows
Lotus 123/Visicalc: did Visicalc ever make it out of text mode? Excel beat those be being a better product.
Borland: also got out competed. Their only product that didn't suck was they're dev products but they couldn't keep up with Visual Studio. They had one database product that took them year to try to update to be competitive and lost their market by taking too long.
None of that has anything to do with "wrath" of MS.
>>None of that has anything to do with "wrath" of MS.
The 'wrath' of any company is one juggernaut leader at the top. Apple's 'wrath' was Steve Jobs and Microsoft's 'wrath' was/is Bill Gates.
As much as we like to state it otherwise, Bill Gates was ruthless at execution, and he was workaholic with no parallel. People aren't exactly replaceable, and by that definition what they bring to the table.
Google? Gone. Linux? Destroyed. Mac desktop platform? Gone. Windows mobile? Total monopoly. MSIE? Dominates the world. Java? Completely unknown compared to Microsoft .net offering.
Oh wait, that's not what happened. Maybe some selection bias is going on?
Intuit was one of the few that survived direct Microsoft competition from MS Money and MS TaxSaver.
Adobe and Autodesk survived because Microsoft never entered the professional graphics editing market of Photoshop and CAD drafting. If Microsoft did try to compete, they still might have lost to Adobe and Autodesk but it sure helps when Microsoft ignores that market. (Microsoft sort of had a competing edocument standard of XPS to Adobe's PDF but that initiative didn't seem to have all of MS's attention behind it.)
Computer Associates (now CA Technologies) was this weird corporation that basically did a bunch of acquisitions of forgettable companies. I can't think of an instance where CA and Microsoft competed head-to-head. CA bought a database programming 4GL (Nantucket Clipper) in 1992 but the DOS based programming languages were already starting to die by then so MS Visual Basic for Windows didn't really compete fiercely with it.
Most of 1980s companies didn't survive, whether they competed with Microsoft or not. Microsoft did, but that doesn't mean it killed every other company that didn't.
But Microsoft competed with Apple, and Apple didn't die. Xenix - Microsoft's UNIX offering - went nowhere (though it wasn't even MS product, technically), and other Unixes still alive. In DOS times, there were pretty successful competitors to MS-DOS (of course, those died when DOS computing died, but I'm not sure this qualifies as direct competition).
For a brief period. So did many other short-term phenomena, from BASIC to MS Access to Clipper to Pacman. And now they are stuff for the museums. Except for Pacman, of course.
> Never made much of an impact on the desktop
So? It still survived competition with Microsoft - and, arguably, won on every platform except Windows, non-Windows .net use is still basically zero and Linux rules server world, so...
> What's the most widely used Java desktop app?
I honestly have no idea. Well, Eclipse of course, IntelliJ suite of tools, probably, but it could be some other apps are Java too and I just don't know it. The point is Java is alive and well despite competition from mighty invincible Microsoft.
Eclipse is way more than just Java IDE. In fact, I've been using Eclipse for many years for a number of purposes, and 80% of that time - not as Java IDE.
They sent Lotus 1-2-3 and Visicalc packing. They destroyed WordStar and WordPerfect. Lotus Notes, Groupwise? Gone. They destroyed Novell. IBM couldn't even sell software for DOS/Windows. Borland? History. Netscape? See ya.
The only people safe from Microsoft's wrath were companies like Adobe.