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Comment by philipov | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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