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Comment by jobeirne | Hacker News Reader

This guy doesn't know the definition of 'monopoly.' Neither MS nor Google qualifies: http://alpha.fdu.edu/~koppl/note19.htm

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The courts have, for the most part, disagreed with your analysis.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

Judge Jackson issued his findings of fact on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86 based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Notes, Real Networks, Linux, and others.

[...]

However, the appeals court did not overturn the findings of fact. The D.C. Circuit remanded the case for consideration of a proper remedy under a more limited scope of liability. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly was chosen to hear the case.

The DOJ announced on September 6, 2001 that it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft and would instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty. Microsoft decided to draft a settlement proposal allowing PC manufacturers to adopt non-Microsoft software.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_compe...

On 27 February 2008, the EU fined Microsoft an additional €899 million (US$1.44 billion) for failure to comply with the March 2004 antitrust decision.

Microsoft may have been a monopoly 13 years ago but they aren't today.

Europe ruled that a primarily foreign company owed them 1.44 billion dollars and forced them to put out a product that no consumers wanted and retailers refused to stock.

The claim in the article was that they're a "convicted monopolist" and I just gave you two convictions.

Nothing I wrote and nothing the article wrote requires them to be a monopolist today. The OP said the article writer didn't know what monopoly meant. I'm pointing out that they know perfectly well what it means and that the OP merely disagrees with their conclusion.

A US court made a finding of fact that MS was a monopoly.

http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm

Not that they were a monopoly, that's not illegal per se. The charges brought against them were related to the abuse of said monopoly.

I never said that being a monopoly was illegal. But they were found to be a monopoly. That's a necessary condition for finding someone guilty of abuse of a monopoly position.

I see "convicted monopolist" and "monopolistic behaviour" in the article. Where is he saying that either of them is a monopoly?

Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly over operating systems in general, and google doesn't have a monopoly over search. But I think microsoft does have a monopoly when it comes to running most of the programs that a business already has. You can more or less replace unix with unix but you can't replace microsoft with anything and expect existing systems to still work. Hopefully reactos will reach this point but it's not there yet.

>>you can't replace microsoft with anything and expect existing systems to still work. Hopefully reactos will reach this point but it's not there yet.

That will be impossible in practice.

It is in a monopoly's interest to not be compatible, so they will make complex systems that will be expensive and take a long time to be bug-compatible with. And when the APIs are cloned, they will have gone to something else. All this will also be well locked down with patents.

The worst part (well, worst for me) is that the resulting systems will be unnecessarily complex and hence unpleasant to use for developers. That is, it lowers my life quality if I work with their systems.

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