Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonas21 | Hacker News Reader

> As an aside, Microsoft fought in court to force OEMs to not install this crap alongside Windows (reasonably since it was damaging their brand and making the machines less secure), but they lost.

This was actually central to the DOJ antitrust case against Microsoft. As part of the settlement, Microsoft had to agree to allow OEMs to keep installing crapware [1].

It's things like this that make me a little nervous when people say that going after big tech with antitrust law will necessarily be good for the consumer.

[1] https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1274453172665253890

View on HN

If I had to guess (without reading the case specifically), it's probably because Microsoft screwed up by forcing OEMs to not install netscape in order to crush them.

It's hard to differentiate 'crapware' from competition, particularly given the context where Microsoft had just leveraged their power over OEMs to crush a competitor.

This still sucks though, a better outcome for users would have been Microsoft being able to require the machines to sell with a clean OS and then allowing OEMs to install software for the user at their request (rather than the OEMs being able to bundle crap for kickbacks).

Somewhat related, apparently the netscape guys went to Redmond and hung up signs around Microsoft's campus mocking them for ignoring the internet. Legend has it Gates saw these and pivoted teams to IE with a focus on crushing Netscape.

Startup talk often discusses how most startups fail not due to competition, but because of internal collapse. Big companies can't compete, innovator's dilemma, etc. There's a lot of truth to that but this is a counter example (and others exist too).

Wildly stupid to antagonize the elephant that's focused on other things to direct all of their resources to destroying you.

> it's probably because Microsoft screwed up by forcing OEMs to not install netscape in order to crush them.

The matter predated the IE / Netscape battle.

The OEMs wanted the ability to yield money off of the desktop for the systems they sell and had been fighting with Microsoft for years to be able to place crap onto Windows when it boots up. The system makers saw dollar signs in being able to sell placement to AOL dial-up and so on. Microsoft used their position to try to keep them from doing that, fearing an inability to control quality for their own product from the first moment the end user begins their experience.

This seems revisionist, and while Sinofsky obviously has some authority on the subject, he likely also has a bias.

The antitrust case was brought by the states because Microsoft's behavior "was not in the public interest." As far as I know, it wasn't just 1 thing. It was the exclusionary licensing (OEMs were forced to pay an "MS Tax" even when they shipped a Linux computer), it was the bundling of IE, and it was their manipulation of their APIs to favor their software.

Plus there was the EU antitrust case that had nothing to do with OEMs.

It's also worth noting that Microsoft defense was...awful? They falsified evidence, they were belligerent/petty. Gates was a particular train wreck (1)

(1) https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/revisiting-the-s...

I always enjoyed the cake tradition: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/06/the-c...

It's a bit naive to think that Microsoft's argument there wasn't just them grasping at straws at any attempt to avoid anti-trust regulation. History has shown that Microsoft themselves would happily jump at the chance to stuff their own pockets by pre-installing crapware on your computer, as evidenced by all the junk and ads on even fresh installs of modern Windows. Remember the Candy Crush auto-install debacle? https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-steer-clear-of-windows-...

I mean, what Microsoft did pales in comparison to Apple's standard business model. How many third party apps have been driven out of business by Apple's preferred first party copy? We still cannot run anything but Safari (or an older, less-featured, reskinned Safari) on iOS.

Anti-trust is a joke and holding Microsoft accountable for 1/10th of today's standard operating procedure was ridiculous.

Anti-trust is only a joke in the sense that it doesn't get wielded enough. No more of these enormous companies forming unaccountable pseudo-governments of their own. Break them up and let the fragments enliven the market with their revitalized sense of competition. Then, when a victor emerges fat and complacent, break them up again and begin the cycle anew.

Apple's market share also pales in comparison with Microsoft's.

I'm pretty sure Apple never made anyone selling an iPhone pay them for an iOS license on all the phones they sell.

That's not to say Apple's conduct isn't egregious, but the context isn't the same either.

> I'm pretty sure Apple never made anyone selling an iPhone pay them for an iOS license on all the phones they sell.

That's a wildly different situation. Of course Microsoft charges hardware vendors for Windows licenses - we have to pay for them too! Windows is Microsoft's main product - should they be giving away licenses to vendors?!? (I'm ignoring the underlying issue of sell vs produce here, because it's such a clear fallacy it's not even worth explaining)

Microsoft was charging vendors for Windows licenses per computer; even computers that were sold without Windows.

Huh, I've never heard of that...

It was a sizable part of the big Microsoft anti-trust case. And also an earlier case except for MS-DOS instead of Windows.

Indeed. I bought a Lenovo laptop from the online Microsoft store in early 2011 (or late 2010).

One if the offered extras was “Microsoft signature” optimized install that sounded like it came with extra stuff. As I was going to install Linux anyway, I declined.

Then I received the laptop which somehow did have “signature” set-up, so I looked into it: it was basically just pristine windows setup without crapware; Apparently, that’s the only thing they were selling at the time, but were welling to take extra money from people who didn’t want crapware.

I somehow remember 'clean installs' being an option with retail Microsoft stores; In fact at one point I think it was the norm.

The Candy Crush thing happened two decades after the Microsoft antitrust case (the suit was filed in 1998 and settled in 2002). It's dumb, but it would be a stretch to argue that Microsoft would have done the same thing if they had been allowed to control what shipped with Windows for the previous 20 years.

Back in the day, if you bought Windows directly from Microsoft, you'd get a pretty clean OS without too much bloat. I guess there were things like Minesweeper and Solitaire -- but those were apparently added to help people become proficient at using a mouse back when this was novel.

Matt Stoller’s “Big” includes an interesting (though flawed) history of how anti-monopoly efforts have often been sacrificed for the good of the consumer. Which arguably was a short-term good.

Yes, a bunch of DOJ lawyers who barely know tech will decide the good of tech.

> going after big tech with antitrust law will necessarily be good for the consumer.

I believe in US antitrust law, better for the customer => lower prices. And installing crapware on laptops means lower prices.

The theory would be that if anyone actually wanted crapware-free laptops, there's nothing stopping any manufacturer from selling them. It's a problem for a market. I think it would be a bad idea to let courts decide what "product quality" is for something like that

Microsoft installs plenty of their own crapware, so even if they had won that part of the lawsuit, our computers would still be full of it.

And I don't think antitrust is supposed to always benefit the consumers, it seems more designed to help the market through competition. But more competition means less compatibility, so we'd just end up with 20 shitty walled-gardens of services instead of 3 good ones. What we need it competition and cooperation, but the market was simply not designed to allow that.

Especially Google's business model of giving away free services to grow their monopoly, then making money off of their data, would not be able to survive. That sounds like a benefit on paper, but most people would consider not getting free Google services a huge problem.

That being said, I still support it. I don't care about the short-term slight negative impacts if it means we rid ourselves of these invasive companies and get at least some semblance of control over our tech.

> It's things like this that make me a little suspicious when people say that going after big tech with antitrust law will necessarily be good for the consumer.

This is what we see coming from a mile away when people (usually user-hostile devs) clamor for the App Store to be broken up etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com