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Comment by zombiwoof | Hacker News Reader

Maybe Microsoft

Apart from their gaming department absorbing every big competitor, I can't think of ways Microsoft is abusing monopoly power like the rest of the mentioned companies.

How about turning Windows into an advertising and data collection platform. Sucking up vast amounts of people's personal data, even corporate data, to leverage against their customers so that MS can take in more profit.

I'm much less concerned about this -- as far as I'm aware, the data collection is standard telemetry that any software provider would want, and the stuff related to advertising is, I think, largely concerned with app recommendations in the Microsoft store -- than I am about anti-competitive bundling practices.

Microsoft may call what they collect telemetry, but it goes way beyond what I'd want or expect to shared with a bunch of strangers at whatever company made the software I'm using. It'd take a whistleblower (or more likely multiple whistleblowers) for us to know everything MS is doing with that data, but they've been shoving ads all over the OS for a long time.

I'm struggling to think of a part of the OS that hasn't had ads shoved into it... the terminal I guess... There have been ads in the start menu, the lock screen, in pop up notices, in the file explorer, in search results, in the control panel, on the task bar, in the share pane, in windows update and in a bunch of windows apps like ink workspace. They've even just force-installed random programs to people's systems.

That (edit: second paragraph) is fair and a good point. Maybe Android has desensitized me to advertising and crap-/bloatware.

I'd wager, too, that the addition of the garbage you're describing has coincided with the OS's worsening performance. File Explorer performance is so abysmal that it may as well be an Electron app.

On the other hand (edit: regarding your first paragraph), Microsoft seems very serious about not falling afoul of the law, probably because of the cost of the anti-trust litigation they faced in the 90s and 2000s(?). It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were nothing for a whistleblower to blow the whistle on.

They're the OG among big tech when it comes to abusing monopoly lower, e.g. during the first browser war.

They've been doing it so long that a generation of programmers grew up under moderate MS

After IBM & AT&T

Uh... aren't they able to do that by leveraging their monopoly in other industries?

That's the definition of monopolistic behaviour that almost got them split up 25 years ago.

Which other industries does Microsoft monopolize? They used to have a personal computer OS monopoly but there is a least one viable competitor, and personal computers have become less relevant as many tasks have shifted to mobile devices. My flagship smartphone cost more than a typical Windows PC.

They hold a dominant position in desk operating systems, word processors, and spreadsheets.

But not a monopoly in any of those categories. Google Docs and Sheets are kind of garbage compared to Microsoft Office if you need to do anything complex or work with large files, but for many users they're good enough.

How is this different from 1998 when Microsoft was accused of being a monopolist?

Apple was selling a desktop operating system that was a competitor to Microsoft Windows, Corel WordPerfect was a thing and so was Lotus 1-2-3.

It's different because in the previous antitrust case, Microsoft was accused of product tying. They apparently had private APIs built into their operating systems which only their own applications were allowed to use, and weren't available to competitors. There is no such allegation today. Any third-party vendor can write Windows applications that work just as well as Microsoft's own applications.

Apple also had a much smaller desktop OS market share at the time. They nearly disappeared but are in a much stronger position today, which makes it harder to argue that Microsoft has a monopoly. There's no strict threshold for market share in these cases, but it's one of the factors taken into account.

Just because they aren't tying their products now doesn't mean that they aren't abusing their monopoly position and leveraging it to boost up their non-monopoly position in other markets.

Hey remember that time MSFT got hauled in front of Congress for shipping IE with windows and making it default?

Yeah, they do way worse shenanigans now.

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