
Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft? - alecstapp
https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/08/08/why-dont-people-talk-about-breaking-up-microsoft/
======
_bxg1
1) Nobody takes the Microsoft Store seriously

2) People barely take Bing seriously

3) Nobody cares about LinkedIn as a channel for free expression, nor is it a
breeding ground for dangerous ideologies

4) Microsoft is generally much more enterprise-focused than these other
companies, which all have very active footholds in the lives of regular
people. When it comes to something like the power to make or break democracy,
Microsoft really has very little impact by comparison.

It's not that Microsoft being so big is _good_ , but it just doesn't have an
impact on the masses that's comparable to the others.

~~~
calais
Antitrust law isn't a tool to secure democracy but to secure competition. I
don't think the worry is about actions taken by Microsoft hurting democracy;
the concern is MS systems being insecure owing to a lack of competitive
pressure and, as a consequence, being vulnerable to democracy-disrupting
attacks.

~~~
nine_k
Lack of competitive pressure?

You can run a few Linux distros as a reasonable desktop OS, with corporate
support and all, if you want.

You can run Apple machines and software for desktop computing, as _many_
companies do.

On servers, Windows is a minority.

MS Office is, of course, a one of a kind thing. Still it's interoperable with
other software, within reason, and just reaps the benefits of the network
effect, much as other specialized "industry standard" software.

As a monopoly, MS's position is weak now.

~~~
yread
OK, now do the same for LinkedIn and GitHub

~~~
xref
Not sure if that’s a question or an agreement with the parent?

GitHub is of course one of many, gitlab, bitbucket, or self-hosted being
common alts.

Same with LinkedIn, it’s just social media like Facebook/Twitter/reddit but
emphasizes biz

------
atlasunshrugged
>One potential reason why Google, Facebook, and Amazon have been singled out
for criticism of practices that seem common in the tech industry (and are
often pro-consumer) may be due to the prevailing business model in the
journalism industry. Google and Facebook are by far the largest competitors in
the digital advertising market, and Amazon is expected to be the third-largest
player by next year, according to eMarketer. As Ramsi Woodcock pointed out,
news publications are also competing for advertising dollars, the type of
conflict of interest that usually would warrant disclosure if, say, a
journalist held stock in a company they were covering.

I see this argument echoed a lot and I doubt it's as overt as this. Maybe
journalists inadvertently have some bias towards social media platforms
because they see it hurting their industry or leading to a fight over clicks
rather than quality content (which I do believe most journalists would prefer
to create rather than clickbait). I find it harder to believe that journalists
have banded together to fight all of the platforms that are potential
competitors to them; an individual journalist probably just doesn't have that
incentive and a news org probably couldn't keep a coordinated activity like
trying to fight social media companies secret (I mean, trying to keep a secret
cabal among journalists must be pretty tough)

~~~
p1necone
Agreed. The much more blindingly obvious reason to me seems to be that Google,
Facebook and Amazon are just really huge companies. Why would you write
articles about something smaller?

~~~
jeanperrot
Are you implying that Microsoft is smaller than Google, Facebook or Amazon?
Using market capitalization as a measure, Microsoft is currently the larger
company.

------
asveikau
Isn't it obvious? Microsoft's former monopoly was eroded first by the web,
then phones, then tablets. Using a non-Microsoft computing platform is nowhere
near as restricting as it was in the 90s.

And they never got the same foothold in newer markets they entered since then.

~~~
techntoke
Except they still control the OS market.

~~~
asveikau
Including macOS, iOS, android, chromeos, linux? (Laugh at the last one if you
must, but it is more viable today than it was in the 1990s chiefly because
platform agnostic web based content is more normal in niches formerly occupied
by Win32.)

~~~
erklik
> linux? (Laugh at the last one if you must, but it is more viable today than
> it was in the 1990s chiefly because platform agnostic web based content is
> more normal in niches formerly occupied by Win32.)

and is also used on the majority of non-personal computers in the world.
That's not some small number and a very large market share.

~~~
audiolover
To add to this:

Science? HPC? Hardware? Web? DIY? These "niches" (which are actually huge) are
dominated by Linux.

You'll be actually laughed out of the room if you talked about using Windows
here, and mac is not even remotely present.

~~~
techntoke
Maybe some people in the science and HPC community, but I find a lot of
developers and people at meetups surrounding Linux technologies are often
using Macs. Red Hat notoriously employees a lot of people that don't even use
Linux. I personally use Arch Linux. You can't really compare something that is
open source though and very modular, to something like Windows though.

------
rdtsc
> Or perhaps Microsoft has successfully avoided receiving the same level of
> antitrust scrutiny as the Big Four because it is neither primarily consumer-
> facing like Apple or Amazon nor does it operate a platform with a
> significant amount of political speech via user-generated content (UGC) like
> Facebook or Google (YouTube).

I can see it being that. MS is not as much in the business of manufacturing
consent, using Chomsky and Herman's famous book title. But, all those other
companies do it to some extent, though, maybe Apple less so. The journalists
from traditional media see these companies eating their lunch, so to speak,
and they've been taking jabs at them periodically.

Regular consumers, perhaps mostly the conservative ones, also think they are
being manipulated so it resonates with them. So in a way the tech companies
managed to make enemies on both sides of the aisle. However, I imagine they'll
be fine. I don't see any of them actually getting broken up, especially when
they've been spending close to $20M/year in lobbying
[https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000067823](https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000067823).

------
irrational
My gut reaction is, we already tried that and it didn't work the first time so
it probably won't work if we try it again. Though MS is a different company
than it was back then. Back then I would've been ecstatic to see MS be broken
up and greatly humbled because of all their destructive abuses. But now...
meh.

~~~
notahacker
I think the general impression is the opposite: people talked about breaking
up Microsoft, they lost an anti-trust suit for overplaying their Windows hand
to try to corner the internet, and ever since they've been using their OS to
_gain a foothold_ in new markets as opposed to cornering them, and being happy
with being the boring second or fifth placed option. So what was done worked
well enough. Sure, MS has acquired large minority shares of lots of markets,
but they're not exactly setting the agenda the way Google does with Android,
Amazon does with logistics or Facebook says it wants to with currency and it
also isn't a _de facto_ moderator of any significant arenas for political
debate, so nobody's interested in that angle either.

Agree on the whole meh thing. I don't think journalists care about Google
hurting their publisher's ads, but I do think they care about not pitching a
thinkpiece from 1995...

------
parasubvert
Because PCs and Office productivity software are a niche, and it’s hard to
argue their market leadership in a niche is being illegally exploited to take
over other markets.

What markets? Well, the only one that matters right now is cloud, as it’s
gradually eating the entire enterprise software and hardware industry, with
hundreds of billions of dollars at stake.

Put another way, Microsoft certainly bought their #2 position in cloud with
Azure by being early to market relative to Google, but also by having a huge
sales field with Microsoft Windows/Office licensing true-ups to use as
discount incentive to buy Azure credits.

Is this illegal? It would be a difficult argument to say so. Given Google’s
position with search and Android, Amazon’s market position in cloud, Microsoft
is a middle pack player everywhere now. Huge, but middle of the pack.

The only argument that holds some water (per this article) is that Microsoft
is big, and big is bad for consumers, therefore, they shouldn’t be big. But
it’s vague and really would depend on the judge hearing the case. Amazon has
the same argument against it as with Microsoft, but it would be hard to prove
they’re harming consumers.

Windows use has very little ability to drive Azure adoption beyond pure
financial sales games - you give me a few percentage points more off Windows
and Office and I’ll buy some of your Azure. That’s common in any sort of
industry transition. Oracle is doing the same thing just very late, with a
questionable service and with less success. IBM too.

What’s interesting is most posters in this thread are still fighting 20 year
old battles. PCs are maybe 27-28% of the market of computing devices these
days. The battle has moved on to cloud services (Amazon being the far away
leader) and mobile devices (mostly setted there too, by Google, though Apple’s
iOS business alone is larger than all of Microsoft).

~~~
dwaltrip
Is it really that niche if it has powered Microsoft to being the most valuable
company in the world?

Not sure what my conclusion is, but Microsoft is an interesting anti-trust
case now that I am thinking about it.

~~~
parasubvert
Yes, it would still be a niche. Microsoft is successful because they are
actually rather diversified. They have several niche cash cows that, combined,
make for a very valuable company. Google struggles with this because they’re
so dependent on search revenue.

It’s not illegal to be big. This article is largely wishful thinking on
whether it should be.

------
dblohm7
Having a monopoly is not illegal. Abusing that monopoly power to take over
other markets _is_.

~~~
wardbradt
I initially thought you were wrong, but you are not.

“Monopolization” [0], which a Wikipedia section on “Sherman Act of 1890” [1]
lead me to, is maintaining a monopoly “through conduct deemed unlawfully
exclusionary. The mere fact that conduct disadvantages rivals does not...
constitute... exclusionary conduct.”

I am most surprised that the Sherman Act explicitly targets monopolization,
not monopolies.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolization](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolization)

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law)

------
omarhaneef
The main reasons are:

1\. The monopoly in desktops is old and considered waning.

2\. It is the only competition for the others in some areas (Azure for AWS,
Bing for Google) so we kind of want it around.

3\. Also, it charges for services so, perhaps, it doesn't need to advertise.
(Pros and cons)

~~~
mrweasel
>1\. The monopoly in desktops is old and considered waning.

Yet their desktop monopoly is as strong as it ever was. I think people just
lost interest in the desktop.

Still I don't think there's a point to breaking up Microsoft, there's not much
to gain. They aren't really misusing their desktop monopoly. People can
actually picks alternatives, if they really wanted, both for the desktop, and
the applications they run. We're no longer locked into paying Microsoft, most
just choose to do so regardless of their options.

~~~
jay_kyburz
I think OSX has made some signifiant inroads in some circles. I don't agree
that windows is "as strong as it ever was".

Still very strong though. In my industry, games, Windows is 96% (70% is
windows 10, 20% windows 7)

------
bluedino
Didn’t they try back in like 2000?

------
Mountain_Skies
A related question, should Microsoft voluntary split or at least spinoff some
parts of the company that are no longer complimentary to each other? They seem
to be charging towards being mostly a cloud services company. Some of their
assets might be more valuable on their own or in the hands of another company.

------
DoreenMichele
Microsoft has already weathered an antitrust suit. That's likely a big part of
why it doesn't come up.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp).

------
yellowapple
Curiously, I spotted no mention of the various Microsoft-focused antitrust
investigations/rulings back in the 90's.

------
calais
The last time antitrust action was taken against Microsoft ( _United States v.
Microsoft Corp._ , filed in 2001), law folks' tech-illiteracy and Microsoft's
slitheriness led to a penalty of merely having to publish API documentation.
The aim had been to make Windows an interface that competitors could
implement.

I hope Microsoft gets served for antitrust again, and that this time a savvier
legal community can actually achieve the goal is the first suit.

~~~
tptacek
This is what you'd believe if all you'd known about the Microsoft antitrust
case was what Wikipedia records about it it in the short "Settlement" section
of the Microsoft Antitrust Case article.

In reality, the case broke Microsoft's monopoly on pretty much everything but
desktop operating systems (the market broke that later on) and a chastened
Microsoft was unable to apply its 1990s tactics to the emerging mobile market,
in which it was soundly trounced.

The antitrust objectives of the government were essentially accomplished.
Microsoft remains a fearsome competitor in the moribund personal computer
market, and essentially nowhere else. Its browser, the focus of the case, is
an an also-ran fork of Chromium. It has more or less entirely lost the server
market, outside of line-of-business applications in the Fortune 500 that it
would have retained regardless of its monopoly status. It's been sidelined
almost entirely from mobile computing. Microsoft doesn't even control office
software anymore!

Linux nerds dearly wanted to see Microsoft split up, because that's a
theatrical and cathartic ending to a case many of them had (weirdly)
personalized. But it's clear now that splitting up Microsoft wouldn't have
served any public policy objective, and Jackson was wrong to order it split
up.

~~~
calais
What Wikipedia records about it is precisely all I knew about it. Thank you
for the exposition and commentary.

I don't think Linux nerds' taking the case personally is weird, though:
antagonism towards Microsoft specifically is a cultural self definition for
many of them. As with any court case that parallels a cultural narrative, it
was felt personally.

~~~
tptacek
OK, "weird" is the wrong word. You're right, I do understand where it's coming
from.

A thing I'd add is that the Microsoft case didn't just chasten Microsoft, but
also the industry as a whole. In at least a couple of FAANG cases, I know
firsthand that antitrust concerns altered product decisions (sometimes for the
worse!). I don't think the case was, in the industry, widely considered a win
for Microsoft.

------
sli
My guess is because they've been marketing themselves extra well lately and
tech folks are eating it up.

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
This.

All that tech people see is Microsoft positioning itself as this open and FOSS
friendly company. But this is just a tiny fraction of what they do and mostly
fuelled by a tiny fraction of their employees.

The corporate facing rest hasn't changed a bit. Quite the contrary. Their
licensing has become even more opaque, their overreach regarding what they
shove down user's throats has increased, and you can't be sure you're the
costumer anymore. But all of this stays hidden within some IT department who
are mostly staffed by Windows admins who wouldn't know better anyway and don't
complain. The developers who rave about the cool new Microsoft never have to
deal with the blunt impact.

~~~
Causality1
It's quite a bizarre thing. With one hand they embrace FOSS, stick a Linux
kernel in Windows, etc and with the other they force updates that erase user
files and break drivers.

