gototheboard.com
"Well, that's interesting" replies the second one, "because I'm also here for an antitrust case: I charge way less than my competitors and they say that I'm doing predatory pricing to kill the competition."
The third one starts laughing hysterically: "Believe it or not, guys, I'm here for the same reason as well! But my prices are exactly the same as my competitors, so they want to convict me of price collusion and profiting from a cartel!"
If they're looking for someone to blame, blame the monopolies, cartels, and predators that abused public trust so badly that laws had to get made.
Plus I heard that the DoJ settlement's API documentation has been delayed to next year. Or was that Duke Nukem Forever?
Plus ca change...
You do understand how this abuses a monopoly position, don't you? I have a feeling this subject hits a libertarian-crank nerve, though.
Regardless, ultimately Microsoft lost the US antitrust lawsuit and is no longer dominant in the era of the Internet.
Much of the money he earned would end up funding good causes so I feel there is some justice in all of this.
If your business had the opportunity to take the contracts he mentioned, would you? Of course there are those silly things called laws that might get in the way of this business deal, but they may not have been clear at the time (I don't know).
All I know is that Gates leveraged his product against an unknown market and then created barriers of entry for other competitors. Machiavellian, perhaps, but brilliant.
If the democratic will of the People is that the government regulates business that's one thing, but retrospective laws are just insidious. A level playing field up front is the only fair way.
Unfortunately there's no bright-line rule that lets you know that today, you're a monopoly. You might write such a sales contract legally on Monday, and on Wednesday cross the invisible antitrust line which (after years of later largely subjective legal argument) obligated you to stop doing the same things that led to your success. So signing the exact same contract Friday would be illegal.
Not quite the same thing IMHO. By not signing the contract and doing what Microsoft wanted, since it was the de-facto standard at the time, you were pretty much kissing your PC sales business goodbye..
Look, anyone can make the offer MS made. If they price it low enough, they could get some takers. It was a smart move, because it meant that a dominant player would have growing market share among manufacturers who worked with them, but it would only work out if the product had traction -- otherwise, dealing with MS would just be paying Bill Gates to watch you fail.
"Hey... Your competitor just signed this deal that allows them to include our OS for pennies. I see you will have a tough time competing with them unless you sign it too".
And if it ain't illegal, it ain't cheating in business.
Regardless of one's opinion on what OS is better, you cannot deny that Gates is one of the most brilliant people of our time. His business practices are what brought him wealth. He may or may not have done a few questionable things, but what business hasn't? This is why we have a justice system. Laws are not always written to be black and white. The justice systme is there to help us define all the gray in between.
If I had the ability to create a monopoly because the laws don't explicitly define a certain prohibition, you can bet your ass that I would. I'd deal with antitrust issues as they came up and leverage what I have already done to move into a new area of exploitation. Whether or not you want to believe it, that is how capitalism is practiced.
If you downmodded me because you don't like Windows, Gates, or my statement on the practices of capitalism, that's fine. I just want to know what you think. There must be some disagreement that you have. I would like to respond to that.
"He may or may not have done a few questionable things, but what business hasn't? "
is stunningly vapid in equating all things "questionable".
Some things really are better or worse than other things, and some companies really do behave better or worse than others.
I think if you ran a business and didn't do these things, you'd be roadkill on the information highway.
I would also like to know if they somehow covertly helped the BIOS reverse engineering process.
Everything they did up to Windows 3 derived from that - do whatever it takes to secure a market for their OS. They did not leave OS/2 to IBM because the codebase was bad. They needed control of the OS in order to keep it a commodity and having a competitor developing the OS that runs on commodity PCs was out of the question. Up to the launch of Windows 3, the public discourse was that OS/2 was the future. It changed dramatically at that minute.
They played dirty tricks all the time. Threatening Apple not to renew the Applesoft BASIC license was a way to secure Apple would endorse Microsoft BASIC on the Mac and ditch a competing product. I don't know what else they got from Apple while their cash cow had a piece of MS software within. It certainly made Apple's contracts better the next time.
They got lucky a couple times and IBM got fooled twice. Their dominance is the consequence of luck and borderline criminal tactics. I see no huge genius here beyond one that was willing to bend the law (and morality) as much as he could.
It's also unclear how much of this came from Ballmer.
As far as I know, the big genius among the Microsoft founders is Paul Allen.
You don't create a powerful company like Microsoft just by being lucky. This is the guy who brought personal computing to the masses. This is the guy who managed to grow his company into the behemoth that it is today. This is the guy who responded to the Internet threat brilliantly (well initially that is.).
Dirty tricks are PARTS AND PARCEL of the world, especially in businesses. The techies are insulated from such behavior, which is why they are usually shocked at such behavior. People on the business side are used to such behavior. They deal with it. They counter back. Wall St revel in it. Govts use them all the time. This is society at its normal equilibrium. Google, being a techie wonderland, is trying to avoid this for as long as possible but trust me, WallSt will push their hands sooner or later.
Paul Allen wouldn't have build Microsoft into the success that it is today. He just isn't as sly as Bill is.