Comment by commandar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by commandar | Hacker News Reader

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Well, two points here.

First, Microsoft has had to play pretty carefully in the past decade to make sure that they don't draw any more antitrust ire.

The other thing would be that they don't have to manipulate the market forever, just long enough to lock out competition.

A perfect example of this in the tech world would be Intel.

They did everything they could to keep AMD locked out of vendors like Dell for years, even when AMD had a superior product. Fast forward a few years, and not only is Intel still the dominate player in the market, but their lead in process technology makes it extremely difficult if not impossible for anyone else to compete. For example, Ivy Bridge has a slightly higher transistor count than AMD's Bulldozer, but has a die roughly half the size of the AMD part.[1] That means that even if AMD was producing a part that performs competitively with Intel, they're going to have difficulty competing with them on price since Intel can crank out more dies per wafer.

Obviously it's entirely speculative whether AMD would have been able to capitalize on increased market share and keep up with Intel long term but Intel doesn't really need to manipulate the market like they used to anymore since they've managed to put themselves in such a comfortably entrenched position.

[1] - http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core...

I feel like your example of this is actaully a perfect counterexample.

If Intel really could manipulate the market successfully, AMD would not exist at all, instead of just having slightly lower profit margins but otherwise similar products, as you describe.

And also, there wouldn't be ARM, which seems to be taking more and more marketshare from Intel. Intel couldn't "lock them out."

And by the way, I think the antitrust action against Microsoft accidentally helped them maintain marketshare. If they had been allowed to continue integrating IE into Windows at the expense of much better browsers, that would have been a boon to Apple and Linux. IE isn't such a huge kludge/security problem now, but it used to be a serious competitive disadvantage. (This is just a hokey theory only tangentially related to the discussion, though.)

>If Intel really could manipulate the market successfully, AMD would not exist at all, instead of just having slightly lower profit margins but otherwise similar products, as you describe.

AMD has been less than financially healthy for years. They've spun off Spansion and GlobalFoundries in the past few years trying to keep head above water.

The point is that Intel was successful in keeping AMD from being able to expand its market share when AMD had a better product and the two were much closer to parity in terms of manufacturing process than they are today. As a result, AMD couldn't afford to reinvest in manufacturing and design, and Intel was able to widen the gap between them.

AMD is still afloat, but they're nowhere near the threat to Intel that they were circa 2000-2005.

>And also, there wouldn't be ARM, which seems to be taking more and more marketshare from Intel. Intel couldn't "lock them out."

ARM was in a completely different market segment that Intel didn't really view as a competitor. As things shift toward mobile, Intel is starting to address that segment, and I think that the process advantage they hold could end up being an even bigger deal there since overall package size and power consumption is such a major factor in mobile. Even if your design is equivalent or slightly better than Intel's from a performance per transistor standpoint, Intel can still win out by being able to churn out more chips than you can at the same cost.

>IE isn't such a huge kludge/security problem now, but it used to be a serious competitive disadvantage. (This is just a hokey theory only tangentially related to the discussion, though.)

Microsoft's bread and butter is the enterprise and IE is still a huge competitive advantage for them there. We're tied hugely to Windows at my workplace almost entirely because of IE.

I have a strong suspicion that Intel is happy to let AMD continue existing just to ward off possible antitrust troubles.

There's the old saying, "If Apple did not exist, Microsoft would have had to invent it." The same is true of AMD, from Intel's perspective.

Well, you're just moving the goalposts there. Intel and NVidia still quite dominate AMD in the desktop/laptop.

By the way, ARM couldn't touch Intel if they wanted. ARM's market is not just another league, it's not even the same game. Even so, where low-power x86 vs. ARM can be viable, Intel will win, by default.

At this point, I think Google should have more worries about antitrust. Google is very aggressive about bundling G+ with everything. I didn't want to get on it, but I was on gmail, Youtube, and a few of their other products, and they stopped working well without it. Once I was on it, there is huge social pressure to use it.

Google Chat, I didn't want, but it was integrated into gmail. Suddenly, I'd have chats from friends pop up as I was working. I presume there's some way to unbundle, but at this point, it's too late.

List keeps going. Google is crushing competitors not by building better products, but by using search to steer them there, and the rest of their chain to force users into them.

Google's motto seems to have changed from indexing and organizing the world's information to hoarding, organizing, and locking down the world's information.

Like Microsoft, they're also getting less and less competent. 6 years ago, their software was phenomenal. Today, it's kind of below average -- they've had a huge brain drain to startups, Facebook, and other places (except for Google X, which seems to be poaching quite well).

It's not as bad as Microsoft in it's prime, but it's getting there. I think in a year or two, they'll actually be worse.

This is kind of a silly comment. Google is only crushing competitors where their services are actually superior. Dropbox still exists and I assume has many more users than Drive. Facebook still exists and is still by far the most successful social network. And even in an area where they were pretty much the first in the field, Maps, there is new competition from Open Street Map. These are just some examples.

People who really don't like Plus and its integration into everything seem to keep using it as some kind of example of Google using monopoly power to force it and its other services to market domination. This just doesn't seem to me to be how it's working. And it completely ignores the fact that all it's actually quite useful to the majority of users, the ones who don't for whatever reason have a problem with it.

> Google Chat, I didn't want, but it was integrated into gmail. Suddenly, I'd have chats from friends pop up as I was working. I presume there's some way to unbundle, but at this point, it's too late.

What does this even mean? Just set yourself to invisible or sign out, and don't go back.

Your "locking down the world's information" comment doesn't seem to make much sense either considering Google is one of the few (if only?) companies to have a data liberation teem, with the explicit goal of making all of your information exportable from Google.

And finally, to call Google's software in general "below average" is just weird. Think about it. Really. It's a weird statement. Their software is better and does more than it did 6 years ago, but has somehow gone from amazing to below average.

IMO Google still isn't anywhere near what Microsoft is. It has quite a long way to fall, if it does.

This is kind of a silly comment. Google is only crushing competitors where their services are actually superior.

And yet here we are: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-16/google-antitrust-pr...

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-24/google-faces-eu-...

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/10/28/google-clarifies-adw...

They may not be guilty of any of these accusations but they are probably better off taking measures to be as transparent as possible rather than continuously defending themselves...

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