What Happened to the Microsoft Monopoly?
economix.blogs.nytimes.com
economix.blogs.nytimes.com
Another important part of the history is Microsoft's June 1997 $150m investment lifeline to Apple when Apple was worth less than $4B. That investment predates US v Microsoft but at the time it was widely believed that part of Microsoft's motivation was ensuring Apple didn't go completely broke and thus invite even more monopoly scrutiny to the PC business.
If they would have succeeded in this strategy, we would have a rich web experience with "web 2.0" applications, however, the protocols would all be proprietary and you would only be able to access them on an x86 computer running Windows and IE. Their strategy of embrace and extend was hugely successful, and you can see the aftermath all around you. Look at the extraordinary lengths developers have to take to support older versions of IE. Up until the justice department rulings in the early part of the 2000s Microsoft was still making subtle tweaks to try and break standard IETF protocols. They had a willful disregard for RFCs and always tried to add Microsoft only extensions on top.
The article is interesting in that he highlights the end result is that innovation trumps monopoly, however, he ignores the damage this caused to both users and entire companies that were literally wiped out by these anti-competitive practices. WordPerfect, Novell, Netscape, and countless other innovative companies were extinguished by this.
Microsoft wasn't doing anything that Netscape wasn't doing. Both of them were introducing their own HTML extensions left and right. Each was free to implement the extensions the other introduced.
> They first tried to create a monopoly on browser market share. By bundling IE with Windows 98 as the default browser, they succeeded in gaining 90%+ of marketshare just by default, which pretty much destroyed Netscape overnight.
That's not correct. What destroyed Netscape was the fact that IE was a better browser. IE did a better job of implementing standard HTML, and it did a good job of implementing Netscape's non-standard HTML extensions, and it performed better.
It's easy to say Microsoft won by bundling, but if you look at sales numbers from before bundling, when the competition between IE and Netscape boxes on the shelves at Egghead and CompUSA and the like, you'll find that IE dominated. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I remember them being massively in IE's favor. (My employer had retail software for sale, so we subscribed to a report from a company that had an arrangement with all the major software retailers to get sales numbers, and they produced a nifty monthly report showing pretty much ever item available at those stores and how many units were sold every month. Browsers were one of the items I watched monthly on those reports).
I will admit that when IE 4 finally came out it was better than Netscape 4 (minus the active desktop crap that bogged down the 64MB RAM systems of the era), however, previous versions of IE were far inferior to Netscape.
Proprietary tags in Netscape? Yeah, I guess if you consider the <blink> tag proprietary, sure. They can be counted on both hands. IE had entire proprietary APIs, not just a few tags. There's a huge difference.
My guess after working at organisations under enhanced regulatory scrutiny, the distraction was probably felt most seriously in the upper cadres of the company as they would have had to critically evaluate acquisitions, new products as well as coordinate the legal and PR.
The decrease in ravenous embrace and extend activities left large numbers of smaller businesses with viable business models, and ensured that the Internet remained fairly neutral for non-Microsoft software (although I still struggle to this day with intranets coded with VBScript for basic things like timewriting: if this had happened on the free Internet, it would have been significantly harder for the Firefox and Web 2.0 people to get any kind of traction...)
It's entirely within reason to believe that had the Justice Department not been breathing down their necks that Microsoft would have used its monopolies to illegally squash the original iPod. There are plenty of examples of products that were well-made, innovative, and desired but didn't make a major market impact for poorly-understood reasons (WebOS comes to mind). It's not at all obvious that the iPod was bound to succeed; if all those amorphous outside factors hadn't gone its way, we could be sitting around discussing how the iPod was a repeat of the Newton, and how inevitable it was that Microsoft finally cracked the the MP3 market with Plays4Sure.
In fact, companies targeted by antitrust (I think it was IBM) have stated that antitrust regulation, by itself, shifted their focus. You are no longer rushing ahead, instead you must be cautious about everything. So it is indeed quite plausible that antitrust actions against Microsoft made possible the current non-Microsoft-dominated era.
Just because MS lost its monopoly on its own does not mean that we, as consumers, would not have benefitted--and would still be benefitting--from breaking up that monopoly when it was more dominant.
Indeed, a lot of what Apple is lauded for today (i.e., integration) is stuff that Microsoft was explicity prevented from doing under the terms of the antitrust injunction.
Things like the iPhone weren't going to come from Microsoft. Rather than beating them in the desktop market, which Apple still hasn't done, it won on a different battlefield.
I remember arguing with slashdot Linux fanatics at the turn of the century, and they stubbornly believed that somehow magically Linux as it was at the time would go mainstream on the desktop and vanquish Windows. It was always an absurd premise. It almost always takes a paradigm shift to leave a big enough opening, and mobile provided that (the desktop still being ruled by Windows).
BSD for desktops, Linux for servers. Not the split I would've guessed 10-13 years ago.
There are very few niches/users left that actually want Windows > Apple, and most of them begin with "gam" and end with "ing".
But, users are pulling these organizations, kicking and screaming into a world in which everyone wants a MacBook Air/Pro.
I really don't envy Microsoft.
Open Directory is basically a ldap with MIT kerberos that can sort of integrate with AD. Most folks setup a hybrid (referred to as the "magic triangle") where you use AD for user auth and OD for computer policy stuff. It's not very robust, and Apple isn't exactly committed to the notion of server operating systems, so it doesn't get much love.
You really need to buy a client app like ADmit Mac, or a server-side solution like Centrify to really work with Active Directory.
AD itself is a really brilliant collection of software. Think of it as a fully integrated, smoothly operation bundle of LDAP, Kerberos and DNS -- it "just works".
Coming from a Unix background, AD was amazing to me as there isn't any Unix equivalent at all, except maybe for the ancient NIS and NFS integrations. You get single sign on. Robust Access Controls. The ability to trust the identities of external organizations. A policy engine to do all sorts of management activities at various levels. Oh, and it allows you to easily build fault-tolerant deployments without much forethought.
Now, you can do this with OD, but it's not as easy as "built into all windows installations, set it once and forget it".
The way Microsoft prices Windows, at least at retail, and the way they segment their OS features for different markets, are really annoying and somewhat painful.
Vs
Unified, Premium market, no hordes of java devs jumping bandwagon, less porting, less chance of backing loser.
Seems likely that the Android party will continue to be a big fractured mess, but at that kind of scale there's always opportunity.
Mozilla owes much of its market share to the EU, which forced Microsoft to bundle competing browers with Windows, and to the collapse of Netscape in the first dotcom bubble.
We can only speculate at this point, but if we take a look at the timeline for the browser wars, we get some interesting insight.
From the mid 90's through 2000, we had Netscape as a serious source of competition for MS. MS released IE 1-6 between 1995 and 2001. That's 5 versions inside 6 years. Netscape was bought out by AOL in 1998, thus ending the need for MS to continue improving IE6. Now, there were other browsers at that time, as Netscape opensourced the browser code and gave it to Mozilla, but they all failed to achieve traction. Throughout the 5 year period of IE stagnation, Mozilla had the time to start the war machine up again and start pushing out new code. MS knew that FF was coming, and they knew the feature set that FF supported. The answer to this was IE7 in 2005, however it was pretty much too little too late. FF2.0 was released in 2006, only about a half year after IE7. It had all the same features (plus a few additional) but guess what? It had an intuitive UI and worked well, unlike the MS counterpart that still reeked of R&D stagnation. Not to say that MS didn't do good things for the web, just that, without another company to light the fire under their ass, they failed to innovate. And that's pretty much where we are now: Microsoft is trying to build a browser that actually works (IE9 isn't a total failure), and Google/ Mozilla keep them on their toes. It's a win win for the consumer.