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Comment by gesman | Hacker News Reader

Normal, regular process of government[s] extracting extra tax dollars from large enterprises in forms of penalties/fines for whatever violations.

This will ends when Google will pay up and promise to do some [cosmetic] changes.

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The more people with a defeatist attitude, the worse the situation gets.

Yeah it did nothing to Microsoft. Business as usual.

Strong disagree. I was at Microsoft post-conviction, and nobody wanted to put anything in writing.

They were ordered to be broken up, a la AT&T and Standard Oil. When that decision got neutered, it was indeed business as usual.

No. They didn't get broken up. But they stopped a number of anti-competitive behaviors for a decade or more. It definitely was not "business as usual", either in internal attitude (from what I've heard) or in external behavior (from what I observed).

For antitrust? I’d say it did quite a bit, given that it lead to other companies being able to enter the market and take over market share from Microsoft.

Did it really? MS lost browser dominance because they purposefully let IE stagnate at 6, and Firefox then Chrome ate their lunch. They lost OS dominance because of the unforeseen dramatic rise of post-iPhone smartphones. The combination of WebKit on iPhones and Android plus Google using it's own market clout to push Chrome on desktop is what really put the nail in IE's coffin. The anti-trust actions from the US and the EU had little to do with this (the EU's decision to force MS to prompt the user to choose a browser happened in late 2009 when these developments were already well under way, and was limited to EU region installs IIRC). MS still dominates OS's on desktops and laptops, but no one seems to care about that anymore.

We have to remember that from IE4-6 before Firefox came around Internet Explorer really was the best browser in town. When MS dropped the ball on that, it was market forces that caused them to lose market share, not any government action. Same with Windows Mobile/PocketPC. And if the EU's goal was to foster browser diversity in their suit against MS, they missed the boat on that entirely.

It exposed all their shady business (and technical!) practices and they weren't able to behave that way anymore.

But I agree, macroeconomic forces were more powerful.

Microsoft actually invested in Apple in 1997, in part to help them deal with antitrust concerns. Without that deal, I don't know if Apple would have been around to build the iPhone.

Perhaps some other company would've kicked Microsoft's butt in mobile. It's impossible to know.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/appleinsider.com/articles/18/08...

bullshit. Saying that Microsoft went through some drastic changes would oversimplify it. As a former employee, Microsoft was basically another company after the anti-trust thing.

I'm actually curious, can you elaborate on that?

I might be missing some history here :)

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