Ever here if a little company called Microsoft that nearly got shut down in the late 90’s early 2000’s for being considered a monopoly? When there only crime was not having any competition? Yea trust me it happens. Cost my dad his entire retirement having been a 35 year employee of Microsoft
I don’t understand. Why did your Dad loose his retirement? They split Microsoft into smaller companies no?
@dyno no, they did not split MS up. It was one of the things being bandied about as a possibility though.
@Rscott laying it on a bit thick there, aren't you? MS was *never* in danger of being shut down over that fiasco. It simply wouldn't have happened in any possible outcome. The government and military both are, and back then were even more, heavily dependent on Windows and other MS products. And no, simply not having any competition was not their "only" crime, in fact it wasn't a crime at all.
The whole antitrust thing was 90% over the browser anyways edit: edit: I shouldn't say it was 90% about the browser, it was 90% spurred on by and driven by the browser lawsuit and claims of antitrust stemming from that. Their crime was their anticompetitive practices - giving steep kickbacks to OEMs like dell not just for volume of OS licenses they bought, but to have no less than 90% of their product line be windows machines that you simply didn't get a choice of linux or other OS or no OS at all. While that may be clothed as a discount or reward, it essentially (in a highly competitive, relatively low margin space like PCs) becomes a penalty if you don't offer nearly exclusively windows boxes.
Also (and this one I very much disagreed with) the whole preloading IE onto the desktop with windows. The argument being that by loading IE on the desktop, and integrating it into the OS, you're essentially giving IE a large advantage in terms of what browser people are going to use - it's already there, why go get another?
But here's the rub - if you don't have a web browser on your computer, how are you supposed to go online and get a web browser? You can't go to netscape's website to download netscape, you don't have a web browser. Yes, you could go to a command prompt and use the built in command line FTP utility, and go download netscape or whatever other browser you could find, but that wasn't a task for novices. If you weren't familiar with the command line, and how FTP worked, and reading directory listings, etc. you were in for a hard time.
I always viewed it as preloading IE onto desktops was doing people a favor - there was nothing to stop people from using IE to go download netscape or opera or whatever other browser their heart desired, and having IE already there just made it easier to do. But, I was looking at it from a common sense point of view, rather than a intricate legal issue and there may have been other facts, like paying OEMs to not preload netscape, that would have made it anticompetitive, that I'm unaware of.
Comparing BRS acquiring *one* other company that was a direct competitor, out of at least several, and then *one* manufacturer (which wasn't a competitor at all, and is vertical integration) to MS antitrust is ridiculous. They're not even in the same ballpark.
