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Comment by MichaelApproved | Hacker News Reader

> The Justice Department is opening a broad antitrust review into whether dominant technology firms are unlawfully stifling competition, according to department officials, adding a new Washington threat for companies such as Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc. ’s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc.

> The review is geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media and retail services, the officials said.

Interesting that Microsoft, the only company worth over $1 trillion, isn't mentioned.

The focus is on online platforms and they don't have anything dominating in that field. I wonder if it'll stay isolated to those companies or if Microsoft will get looped into this because they're so large.

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One thing Microsoft has going for it - they’ve been through this process in the 90s / early 2000s. Plus, their OS is clearly not a monopoly, their web browser is now based on Chrome, their a distant #2 in the cloud space, their a very distant #2 in search, etc

Literally, I can’t think of one thing Microsoft is top dog in besides OS.

MS Office. They're 100% dominant in word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

..but they don't leverage their MS Office dominance to harm the market. You can access MS Office with the open HTTP(S) standard. MS Office works on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and in WINE. It follows the OOXML standard which you can open in LibreOffice as well.

Apple -> These $%^&ers don't allow anyone to repair their own devices, they don't allow a different distribution method on iOS/iPodOS devices hence quickly evolve to unfair market advantage.

Amazon -> Undercut anyone at any cost while having the worst review system on our planet.

Facebook -> RIP privacy, just see the recent scandals.

Google -> Probably something involving Android...

Microsoft? Oh I can write a book about my terrible experiences with that company. I hated this company and everything it stood for for about 15+ years or so (at least 1995-2010). Recently though? Not so much.

> Google -> Probably something involving Android...

Hopefully IE^h^h Chrome as well.

> Microsoft? Oh I can write a book about my terrible experiences with that company. I hated this company and everything it stood for for about 15+ years or so (at least 1995-2010). Recently though? Not so much.

Don't count on me for a book, but otherwise I think I agree to a large extent.

I still don't trust them though, and from time to time they tend to remind me not to let my guard down.

Is that still true? I’m guessing Google Docs has a non-trivial marketshare. Probably not bigger than MS but real competition.

The EU discussed forcing Microsoft to open up the Office document formats as part of the antitrust remedies they enforced against Microsoft (in the same way that they forced Microsoft to open up the protocols used for Windows Server to communicate with Windows clients), but ultimately they did not do so.

True , but i can't think of a way in which they used this dominance against others lately. Antitrust action aims to fix competition, and they won't do it if they think it's not broken.

Google Docs is pretty big, too.

> their a distant #2 in the cloud space

I'd challenge that assertion outside the SV world. 2nd place definitely, but distant no so much, at least in the circles I work in.

According to this analysis of Q4 2018, AWS has twice the market share (32.3%) of MS's (16.5):

https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-market-share-q4-2018-...

I would call that "distant."

This is completely subjective, but I wouldn't consider a 16% difference all that distant, myself. ("Twice" can be misleading; 2% is twice 1%.)

Which is funny, because (as I recall) this was exactly Bill Gates' argument during the antitrust rulings, that tech was fleeting and they could lose their top spot anytime.

Granted, that was over 20 years ago...

...and they (1) altered their behavior because they were in those court proceedings AND (2) lost only to open source competitors (Firefox, Apache, Linux, etc). MS had already declared that IE6 would be the last version of IE, and only revisted that after Firefox brought out tabs and hit a 1.0 version that managed to reach the unthinkable portion of 10% market share.

Had Firefox been coming from a company that could be bought, it wouldn't have remained available to hit that 10%, and MS would have retained their chokehold on everything, possibly until the iPhone became significant (that arose from Apple, which MS literally invested in to be able to argue they still had competition).

MS today is indeed a different beast - but I've never been convinced the antitrust suits were misplaced. The market of competition was _broken_ and consumers suffered. Even if breaking up MS wasn't required to eventually rebalance the market, that doesn't mean all the steps along the way did nothing.

>MS had already declared that IE6 would be the last version of IE

Never heard of this. Do you have a source?

I remember it distinctly from when it occurred...but I'm unable to find any news articles from the time (in my defense, i'm struggling to find any news articles from the time AT ALL - my google-fu grows weaker) - so while I remain personally confident, everyone else should consider this unproven allegations.

But a big reason they lost their top spot was due to the antitrust proceedings.

Thanks to antitrust, they weren't able to force (as much) their garbage IE and Bing. The market was able to confidently invest money in creating other browsers which created better products.

Also, of all those companies, Microsoft is the only one operating a search engine in China.

Microsoft isn't a part of FAANG so they don't get mentioned often

Microsoft enjoys a very close relationship with the DoD.

Based on that this sounds like it may be more related to the politicization of the Justice Dept. under Trump than concern for actual monopolies.

> The review is geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media and retail services, the officials said.

Trump has railed constantly that "conservatives are being censored" on Twitter and Google, which is utter nonsense, so this report in addition to the reports from last year of him wanting to tax Amazon just because Jeff Bezos owns WaPo and they don't print flattering stories of him daily sounds more likely to me the reason for an investigation than anything else.

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