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Comment by notRobot | Hacker News Reader

"Google does this wrong thing so MS should be able to too!"

No, that's not how this works. If it's wrong, stop Google from doing it, instead of letting others do it too.

Not disagreeing with you on it. But to stop google we'd need acts of legislature from multiple countries. At best we'll see results in 5 years.

MS can't wait that long for a maybe sort of kind of. Just being practical here.

I think in monopoly playbook 2.0, it’s not a monopoly if it’s free. And it’s not a monopoly if your public relations are terrific.

I'd bet that we see a serious US antitrust investigation into Google within the next year. No new legislation needed.

No there won’t. The only reason why there was an anti-trust case against MSFT back in the day was because MSFT was too busy making and neglected to do political “contributions”.

Silicon Valley took noticed and now they are the top political “contributors”.

$100 to charity; I'll meet you back here in a year (or less)

The difference is that people are stuck thinking it's still 1997 and that when Google does it, it must be good, because Google is an upstart and on our side. When Microsoft does it, it must be evil, because they're big and evil Microsoft and not on our side.

Microsoft and Google are both monopolies, and thus bad for competition. One has a desktop/server operating system and office productivity monopoly and the other search and smartphone software monopoly.

Google figured out that to compete with Microsoft and Apple you have to basically give it away for free. Look no further than Android and Google docs.

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