Hacker News Reader

Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

The proposal of what to do is for the Justice Department to sue them for antitrust violations and for the courts to break up the divisions of the company that engage in unlawful anticompetitive behavior.

Not only is it plausible we saw it done with Microsoft, and the result was an explosion of entrepreneurship and innovation in the relevant markets, which were software and internet services.

View on HN

No, Microsoft was never broken up. That was the initial judgment. The case ended in a settlement [0] which didn't require all that much from Microsoft. The obligations have now long expired.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/503541/downlo...

That’s correct, they settled before any divestiture was forced on them, and I assume Google might too.

But the threat stopped them from dominating the browser market and enabled the first dot-com explosion.

We would be way better off today if there was a powerful countervailing force to all this FAANG consolidation. The current environment is deeply harmful to innovation.

> But the threat stopped them from dominating the browser market and enabled the first dot-com explosion.

The first dot-com explosion was well under way at that point. Microsoft's domination of the desktop didn't stop any e-commerce companies.

The inquiry was opened in the early 90's and Microsoft's first consent decree to stop them from tying was in 1994. They later argued that IE shouldn't count and continued to bundle Explorer with Windows, and the US DOJ plus twenty states sued over it in 1998.

So, no. The threats of antitrust enforcement against MS were a key part of the timeline for the first dot-com explosion, as they made MS curtail their behavior and provided startups with a little breathing room to exist without being instantly crushed by Bill Gates.

I'm old, I was starting my career and working in and around tech startups at the time, it was a big part of the discussion then. It's hard to overstate how dominant and scary MS was at the time, they didn't have any real rivals.

Microsoft didn't compete in e-commerce. They competed on desktop operating systems.

Name an e-commerce company Microsoft tried to compete with.

Expedia started as a Microsoft division before it was spun off into its own company.

The settlement did no such thing. The fact that not only Google spammed chrome ads on the most popular web page but they also bundled Chrome with third party installers led to the rise of Chrome.

Chrome was launched in 2008. The key events in the Microsoft antitrust case happened between 1992 and 2002.

And look at IEs market share until 2008....

https://www.jitbit.com/news/3304-browser-market-shares-1993-...

I mean, I get what you're saying, but I don't think it's that controversial to point out that facing serious consequences from the US DOJ put a serious check on the actions of Microsoft and held them back from employing their embrace, extend, extinguish model on the web.

How so? Out of three of the areas where they were investigated - there is only one where they are not still dominant. They lost browser market share because Google was the most popular web destination.

MS lost the mobile market - but outside of Apple, “winning the mobile market” was a Pyrrhic victory for Google [1]. Apple won by selling hardware not by licensing.

But they are the second largest cloud provider and are making far more than Google is making on mobile. Microsoft also don’t have to pay the competition a reported $8 billion a year because their competitor has the most valuable customers.

They also successfully pushed their way into the console market. MS is still the 3rd most valuable company in the US. Down from #1 in 2002.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...

lol what? Microsoft did not get broken up. Attributing the dot com boom to the antitrust suit is a very creative interpretation of a spurious correlation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com