He made computers affordable? Is that what you call a convicted monopolist, using anti-competitive tactics to drown out competition? Making things affordable?
He exploited market power and made, by and large, shitty products that at best people have tolerated because they felt they had no alternative. Having done that for two decades, he grew a conscious and started handing out all his ill-gotten gains.
There is nothing illegal or immoral about having a monopoly. It is the natural state of affairs for many markets. Microsoft was convicted of abusing their monopoly. And abuse of a monopoly is somewhat tricky to process from an ethical perspective: a company using their base in one market to provide an advantage against competitors in a new, related market is totally normal, accepted business practice. It only becomes "wrong" when it succeeds too often. So how does a company decide where to draw the line without help of the courts? At which point do you stop doing an activity that you've been hitherto commended for?
From a market perspective it probably makes sense to have regulations restricting some cases of anti-competitive practices. But it's malarkey to go from "we have regulation for this" to branding someone unconscionable because they run afoul of it.
"There is nothing illegal or immoral about having a monopoly. It is the natural state of affairs for many markets."
If you are saying that what's natural is necessarily moral, you are committing the "naturalistic fallacy" (aka the "is-ought" fallacy)[1] In brief, it means you are confusing what is (the supposedly "natural state of affairs") with what ought to be (ie. what is moral).
It is quite possible to argue that the "natural state of affairs" is, in fact, immoral, and what ought to be (ie. what is moral) should be different from this "natural state of affairs".
"Microsoft was convicted of abusing their monopoly. And abuse of a monopoly is somewhat tricky to process from an ethical perspective: a company using their base in one market to provide an advantage against competitors in a new, related market is totally normal, accepted business practice."
"Normal, accepted business practice" could very well be immoral.
made, by and large, shitty products that
at best people have tolerated because they
felt they had no alternative
Microsoft Office was quite good from the get go. WordPerfect may have been better, but Office was more affordable. It won on merits, and although later they preserved this newly acquired monopoly through proprietary formats, Office is a pretty good product.
Internet Explorer kicked Netscape's ass. It only stagnated after version 5, when there was no competition remaining, but IExplorer was then the equivalent of today's Chrome ... fast and innovative.
Also people only remember Windows 9x and cry about the failure of OS/2, but NT 4.0 was released in Jul 96 and it was a pretty good operating system. It evolved later in Windows 2000 and XP. And it wasn't sold to consumers because consumers didn't want it. Instead consumers wanted 100% backwards compatibility - this was a hard constraint to workaround as hardware was not powerful enough for emulation modes.
People also cry about how Microsoft killed Netscape and yet how many people are willing to pay for their browser? Some people do, but not that many. And the Internet is useless without a browser. The irony of the situation is that many of the people blaming Microsoft for Netscape also love free stuff. And you really should do some reading on what Netscape did, because the truth is they killed themselves with whatever remained going on to live as the Mozilla Foundation, which is doing fine.
The thing is operating systems are natural monopolies. And when owning such a powerful monopoly, it is hard to not abuse it ... witness Apple, they don't even have a monopoly yet and are acting like total jerks. Witness Google for that matter and how they basically killed WebOS and MeeGo.
Is it fair? Probably not, but MeeGo is also dying because of Nokia's incompetence and WebOS is also dying because of HP and Palm. You can't blame only Android for that.
I got my first computer 16 years ago. It came with a licensed MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups. It was built by a local computer shop. It was a lot cheaper than what I could buy from any US company.
Yeah... which was incompatible with previous version of itself, which happily saved deleted information in the file, crashed like hell and (in my opinion) taught people to just mark stuff and change it, instead of structuring documents properly.
Most people don't really care about most of the things you mentioned. Office was and is still stable, useful and easy enough for most people and businesses.
but the central issue in US vs. Microsoft at the time was the bundling of their own browser with their operating system. i'm not saying that there weren't other anticompetitive practices going on at the time. but apple essentially does the same thing with safari, and there are some instances with OSX where one can't override the default browser with another.
it's curious that the US gov't isn't going after apple for predatory practices in this case. i guess it's due to the fact that OSX still has a very small market share, overall.
but consider another case where it doesn't ... iOS. apple is essentially guilty [to a larger extent] of the same thing microsoft was convicted for. last time i checked, there were no alternate browsers available in iOS because apple's licensing terms strictly prohibit it. the closest anyone has come is opera.
"Predatory practices" or whatever you want to call bundling stuff with the operating system - is not against the law.
UNLESS you are using a monopoly you have in one field, to further a monopoly in another. Which is what Microsoft were doing (as decided by courts). Lookup "antitrust" and "sherman act" for the US legislature, but similar laws exist in all western countries.
Apple never had such a monopoly position. Some "smart" people claim that apple has 100% monopoly on selling Apple products, and should thus be subject to similar antitrust provisions. Apple now has ~10% market share of personal computers. Microsoft at the time had >90% market share. That's why they they were regulated. Not just because they were anticompetitive.
I never understood what was wrong with bundling the browser with the OS. Every OS comes with a bundled browser, including Ubuntu, FreeBSD, OS X, the iPod, the Kindle, darn near everything. I'm annoyed that there's no bundled browser in my Roku box.
They were not convicted for giving a browser free with their OS. They forced their OEMs to supply with only IE, and not with Netscape. If the OEMs supplied with Netscape they would lose volume discounts & mktg money.
Since no OEM could sell without MS, and losing the discounts would be death in a super price competitive market, this essentially meant Netscape couldn't use the same OEM channel to market.
That's misusing a monopoly to enter a different market. And that's what they were convicted of.
He made computers affordable? Is that what you call a convicted monopolist, using anti-competitive tactics to drown out competition? Making things affordable?
He exploited market power and made, by and large, shitty products that at best people have tolerated because they felt they had no alternative. Having done that for two decades, he grew a conscious and started handing out all his ill-gotten gains.