Deal forcing Microsoft to offer browser choices ends

In retrospect, the courts were wrong. Netscape's profit model made no sense. People didn't want to pay for commodity software like a web browser. MS had every right to release a free one bundled with their platform. The web isn't some optional thing. A browser is part of every OS now.

On top of it, the deal MS signed didn't let it control OEMs so that laptop that's full of shitware that slows Windows down and gives it a huge attack surface is not something MS could fight until recently with Win8. The government empowered OEMs.

The Netscape/MS fight wasn't worth it. The government should never have stepped in. In the end the best product wins. I, and everyone I know, got Chrome via downloading it. Not via some fancy choice menu.

I think the truth here is that Netscape had a lot of friends in the government and Clinton's DOJ wanted to make some career defining kills. Bill Gates was an obvious target. It was wrong for Clinton to attack MS. It didn't stop IE6's dominance, it didn't revive Netscape, and it didn't fix anything. If anything, it made everything worse.

Tech is generally a meritocracy. People can just migrate to whatever software they life. MS wasn't stopping Firefox or Netscape from being installed. Lets give our companies room to compete. Lets not applaud heavy handed legislation from either the US or the EU. I mean, google fucking maps can't even be seen in Spain due to corruption. Governments are just as corrupt as business. Except government is an unstoppable monopoly with guns.

Its sort of like Google search now where when you search for "ann arbor map" you get a giant beautiful link to another Google property and a few riffraff links to other competitors that basically nobody ever clicks on because it would take effort.

This is exactly where Microsoft was in the 90s / early 2000s with browsers. They had a dominant desktop share and they directly embedded IE and although there were alternatives, clicking takes effort and nobody did that. They just used IE. The EU forced them to provide an explicit, easy option to reduce that advantage.

Given Google's dominant share in search, it would not be surprising to me to see the EU force them to change this for the same competition reasons.

Also, it was a great way for the EU to shake Microsoft down for billions of dollars and ensure there was no one company more powerful than the EU, but I'll leave that to the conspiracy theorists.

If a dominant player bundles their browser (as a component) in their OS, people become less and less aware of the browser as a possible and separate "product", and will of course use the dominant one as default - this is (and effectively was!) bad for competition and evolution(any web developer can tell you the pain this caused and still causes today).

Netscape was the sizzle and you pay money to get a browser to surf internet.

Microsoft decided to package IE for free on Window.

Internet was wild west and mysterious. There's hardly any books on it and information wasn't traveling as fast for the masses to know much about internet.

But they do know there's this IE thingy that will give them internet.

IE destroyed netscape, very few people had a clue there was an alternative browser...

Hence this was deem as a monopoly.

Hell when I was a kid I didn't really know much other than netscape and all of a sudden IE. It didn't occur to me that there are choices but the fact that IE was a part of window and it just works out of the box. I moved to mozilla when IE was slowing down.

But the point was it was so integrated with window that it was apart of it, it felt natural as if the internet was apart of microsoft.

And in fact microsoft acted as a gate keeper of the internet for years that was their business goal. Their OS control stuff on the PC and that's how they made money. Which is why they lost to Google when they double down on their model. The way they acted and their many moves to monopolize it, one of which was IE.

The grand dream has long been to have a set of standards which web browser designers and network infrastructure designers must design to. In reality, standards development and compliance has a lag time to it that brings frustration to those who need web sites for their business models. So, in all practicality, they will design and test for perhaps one, two, or three platforms - as popularity may guide - and make use of non-standard methods where standards-based methods are lacking.

Add to this what others have observed, that the typical user knows little to nothing about what a web browser is, or even cares to know.

Companies that manage to achieve popularity for their internet technologies - such as a web browser, among other things - tend to have stronger voices and more powerful influences on standards committees. That gives them a competitive edge in that they can push for a standard where their products are already or nearly compliant with, thereby forcing others to expend energy (cash + time) into whatever reverse engineering projects needed to comply. Alternatively, the stronger voices can also induce more heel-dragging.

In the meantime, companies that have the popular technologies - such as Microsoft, especially in the 1990's - can more easily make sales to the businesses requiring web sites, for either internet or intranet needs. And consumers find their internet surfing experience generally satisfying with the home computer as they got it (again, especially in the 1990's, that was MS Windows + Internet Explorer).

Microsoft was uniquely positioned for dominance. They made the most popular desktop OS, and equipped it with a ubiquitous web browser (for both Windows and Mac OS back then). They then also had the server technology, software development tools, and a "portal" to funnel consumers to advertisers and shopping sites. Basically, they were leveraging their software technology and market position to get into the same business that Netscape had just started. They succeeded tremendously, and basically squeezed out much of the competition, including Netscape.

Think of it this way, it's akin to a car manufacturer selling cars with labels that state that anything other than XYZ branded gasoline will cause damage and void the warranty. Sure, maybe it won't cause damage and sure it may not stand up in court that it voids the warranty, but most people aren't in the position to know that, nor should they need to be in the position to know.

We ... the community of technology savy ... are very frequently remiss to ignore that not everyone can be, nor should have to be well informed about technology. Think of if Martha Stewart claimed that her recipe will only turn out if you use Greenest Pastures Milk when you are trying to hobble together a cake to impress your family. Are you informed enough about the intricacies of milk that you would know that you can use other milk brands?

Sure, you may scoff and say that you know enough about milk to know that it's not true, but do you know that some brands don't have additives or certain types of fat that may collapse your batter?

I don't necessarily agree with such policies. For example the EU is thinking of breaking up Google because supposedly local players cannot compete, with inferior products in a market that Google created, but that's not mentioned.

Of course, iOS does suck because of its restrictions and I sold my iPhone 6 that I received as a gift. So I just exercised my right to vote with my wallet, which imho is more effective.

The anti-trust laws are for when that power gets abused -- when one uses their monopoly power as leverage over another market. In the case of Microsoft, by bundling IE with Windows, they were using their OS monopoly to crush a competitor in the market for web browsers.

None of this applies to Apple because they have nothing close to a mobile monopoly. If they did, the lawsuits would be over their position as gatekeepers of the entire market for mobile apps.

  IE-dominance has finally more or less ended