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Comment by jdpedrie | Hacker News Reader

I was talking with a friend about this recently. I am not old enough to remember the days when Microsoft totally dominated and Bill Gates was literally Darth Vader, so in my eyes Facebook's position seems uniquely powerful and unstoppable. I'm not sure whether it's really so, or whether I'm just falling victim to a present-day bias.

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Microsoft was far, FAR stronger and more destructive. One can easily avoid Facebook today and still use the Internet if they so choose. In the 1990s it was exceedingly difficult to avoid using or paying Microsoft if you used or bought personal computers, either in your personal or business life. They also made it their business to thoroughly crush anything open or standardized that competed with their own technology. Facebook is not even close.

Really? I would argue they are even more active and effective at stifiling competing products.

See Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. While Facebook and Google are dabbling in this behavior, Microsoft was the master of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend_and_extingui...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

Is Facebook charging Apple and Samsung a fee to preinstall their app on every smartphone the vendors sell, and then refusing to do any business with them unless they do so on ALL devices?

Unstoppable Microsoft was disrupted mostly by the rise of mobile phones. As long as PCs were the main device, they were the unstoppable monopoly (with Apple capturing an extremely lucrative but rather small 10% or so Market segment and nothing else even registering).

They woke up one day and realized people now consume media through their phone; but they were already unseated at that point (their phone ecosystem, due to tie ins into the Windows system, could not compete in the brand new iOS/android/blackberry world of the time; and shortly after, neither could blackberry)

I believe zuckerberg is branching into anything he thinks might at some point be "the next thing", including VR, because of how Microsoft missed the train.

It seems Microsoft believed they can always throw enough money while playing the long game and get a dominant position (as happened with internet/ie, Xbox, etc) - but it seems this strategy has failed miserably with mobile, tablets and may eventually cost them a lot more dominance.

Yeah, in the 90s Microsoft was basically this unstoppable juggernaut that ruled the Desktop with an iron fist. The main cause of their decline was that a new market appeared which they failed to capture - namely, the mobile market (as well as the server market that became dominated by Linux). For Facebook to suffer a similar fate, I would think some new type of market would need to appear that Facebook fails to capitalize on - but it's hard to think of an analogous "new market" that could appear that would fundamentally displace a social network in the way that mobile displaced/disrupted Desktop. Maybe VR? (Although Facebook is trying to get into that as well...)

Still, from my perspective, Microsoft in the 90s seemed as unstoppable and ubiquitous as Facebook does today - actually, it seemed more unstoppable than Facebook, because back then we weren't yet used to the possibility of scrappy startups turning into billion dollar companies overnight.

I'm going to disagree with some of my fellow commenters and say Microsoft's position was stronger, and indeed, may still be stronger even now. Facebook lives by the social network and dies by the social network; it is both fueled by, and vulnerable to, more powerful network effects than Microsoft ever was. They have an opportunity to go MySpace in a way that Microsoft never did. Microsoft's monopoly wasn't broken from the outside by people muscling in on its turf, Microsoft was broken by failing to keep up with trends and missing out on mobile until it was way too late. Even now, Microsoft is a huge going concern making tons of money, and remains quite virile when it wants to be; witness how even after years of ignoring the "cloud office suite" space that Office 365 is pretty casually demolishing all the in-hindsight-feeble competition, which includes Google. I'd say Facebook has a much greater chance to be all but gone in five years. I am not predicting that will happen, just saying I'd say the chances are greater than Microsoft being all but gone in five years.

And I'd also suggest the behavior of Facebook shows this to be their own assessment as well. I'd suggest that the headline is wrong; Facebook beats every rival because anyone who becomes a rival they simply buy; this effect is more important than coopting features because it puts a ceiling on their competition. The feature cooption is more about minimizing the number of companies they may have to buy.

I remember the days of Microsoft's monopoly, and I feel that Fakebook's position is stronger than Microsoft's, but it's not unique. I feel that Google's position is stronger still. Between them and Amazon, there is more of an oligopoly than a monopoly now. They will compete amongst each other following whatever compromises they come up with, but any one of them is in a position to squash upstarts, for the good of the group.

My impression is that Microsoft was a lot stronger than Facebook or Google are now. Not having a Facebook account is annoying, but there is a very large world outside of Facebook. If you have a website that is not in Google's index, then you have a problem. But for just about anything else from Google there are plenty of alternatives.

When Microsoft was dominant, basically a PC implied that the operating system came from Microsoft. Very few people had the option of not running DOS or Windows. People would regularly send Word or Excel document and there were no reasonable alternatives to Office to deal with those.

And without the Internet, finding details on how to avoid Microsoft was also hard.

> People would regularly send Word or Excel document and there were no reasonable alternatives to Office to deal with those.

Corel, Word Perfect, Lotus... others.

My recollection of that period is that Microsoft kept changing the formats of Word and Excel files fast enough that trying edit those files with Word Perfect or Lotus was domed to fail. At some point even finding a common version among different versions of Word was almost impossible.

>I feel that Google's position is stronger still.

I'm not sure there's much in history to compare to Google. Their individual market share in search, browsers, ad networks, phones, and email is impressive. But more interesting is the synergy between them.

It scares me a bit how much we rely on them to not abuse that power. Not just in a consumer sense either. Think of some of the slimy things that were done over at Uber for example, like the "God View" app, tracking journalists, etc. If Google wanted to, there's any number of awful things they could do.

If the government had not stepped in Microsoft would have owned the entire internet. They could have killed Firefox and Chrome by not allowing them to be installed. They were already building proprietary features into IE that only their products could use. The open web would be dead and become a proprietary web owned by Microsoft.

That was never going to happen. The value proposition for DOS and Windows was that they were open to running anything and everything. Microsoft was the ocean, not the shark.

As for adding features to browsers, they all did that. Netscape tried to build its business on "looks better in Netscape", and Microsoft simply implemented support for Netscape features (much like it had implemented support for 1-2-3 and WordPerfect features in Office).

There was never any prospect of "a proprietary web owned by Microsoft". In the mid-90s, Microsoft did have plans for a web-like network as a sort of distributed OLE (Blackbird), but quickly went "all in" on the web. The closest was the use of ActiveX controls on the web, but other browser makers could have supported ActiveX if they had wanted to. (Firefox decided against.)

Otherwise, neither Firefox nor Chrome existed when the anti-trust case ended, and there has never been any prospect of Microsoft killing either. It was Netscape that featured in the anti-trust case, and Microsoft won the browser case 2-1 on appeal.

You're judging Microsoft's actions as if they kept their systems open out of the goodness of their hearts or something. The only reason Microsoft didn't get more aggressive with their lock-in attempts was because of antitrust fears. Apple blocks apps on iOS at their whim, no reason MS would not have done the same with their monopoly to devastating consequences.

Not at all. I'm just stating the facts. You're indulging in speculation.

>> Fakebook

Can we please not indulge in this RMS-esque infantile name calling?

I swear it was a typo. I'm not going to fix it.

Microsoft didn't lost their dominating position. They took a hill, made themselves strong there and never lost it.

It's just that the rest of us moved to other places and leave them defending their hill.

IMO Microsoft was way stronger, but the market was far smaller. Microsoft literally sucked the oxygen out of the entire industry. Facebook has a million niches.

When they offer centralization, you go decentralized. Mastodon is neat and growing quickly.

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