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.
Tower Records destroyed a lot of cool record stores.
Wall Mart destroyed a lot of neighborhood grocery stores. Lidl and Aldi did the same in Europe.
Barnes & Noble did the same for charming bookstores.
My point: it is not the winner that is ruthless, it is the game.