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Yeah and look how they extended and extinguished that!

I mean, they dominated internet browsers by being the default option until they sucked at it so hard people downloaded alternatives.

I’m not sure you want to invite the comparison.

To be fair on that, both the US and EU governments launched antitrust cases around that with the US case narrowly avoiding having the company split up and the EU ruling resulting in requirements the browser be decoupled, followed by half a billion in fines for not doing so well enough.

Not that the two situations are anything alike, but a "and look what happened with that" argument hardly points away from valid antitrust outcomes.

I think you and parent/GP all agree? A thing can be anti competitive, and a strategic failure.

If that's what the parent and GP are saying then we definitely don't agree. In my mind, it was anticompetitive and a rousing success. Microsoft managed to fully execute the extend and extinguish phases to then hold a stranglehold on the web for roughly a decade at a cost of less than a billion dollars. Anticompetitive measures kept it from being worse, but it was far from a bad outcome for Microsoft either.

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