I always find it fascinating to compare just how large the tech industry has become since this era, when Microsoft was already regarded as something close to a giant in the industry. Microsoft sales 1995: $6.1 billion ($10b today) Google is about 12x larger. AWS by itself is about 3x larger. Facebook is 5x larger. Salesforce is similar in size. Oracle is 4x larger. SAP is 2x larger. VMWare is closing in on 1x that si…
It was considered more than something close to a giant. If anything, it was considered scarier than anything we have now. Back then there was nobody else. We've gone from a monopoly to an oligopoly (ish) which in some ways feels less scary. It's hard to overestimate Microsoft dominance in the 90s. If there was a wiff of them entering a category, the players in that space would be in trouble (similar to Amazon today,…
Yes, I recall those days intimately. It was hysteria and laughable even then. Breathless magazine articles claiming Microsoft was going to dominate everything, set up toll roads on the Internet, dominate e-commerce, publishing, media, and so on. None of it was even remotely feasible or credible.
The fear that briefly surrounded Microsoft's reign was almost entirely baseless hysteria. Its preeminence and monopoly abuse era lasted for six or seven years. Facebook has been abusing US consumers with its social monopoly for longer than that already, as has Google with its search monopoly (they're at least a decade plus in now). Both Facebook and Google are not only drastically more powerful and wealthy (greater financial resources by at least a factor of 10) than Microsoft in 1995-96, their reach is far beyond anything Microsoft had at that time. World-wide PC sales in 1995 were a whopping 70 million.
Google and Facebook touch nearly all corners of the globe, in real-time, at all times. Billions upon billions of people. Microsoft's reach in 1995-96? Extremely slow in nature, and less than ~150 million people globally.
Ability to throw or bias elections and control global commerce? Microsoft had almost none of that type of power with their operating system, or IE. Extraordinary amounts of commercial activity and referral flow directly through Google and Facebook products/platforms each day. Google's algorithm changes have dramatic effects on businesses. Android is a far larger gatekeeper and toll road than Microsoft could have dreamed of in 1995. YouTube by itself is roughly worth as much as all of Microsoft was in March 1995 (and has dramatically greater influence and reach, along with a monopoly position in what it does), Instagram is worth even more.
And Netscape, Microsoft's most famous 'victim'? (although not the thing that really got them in anti-trust trouble) The notion of building a large business around charging for a consumer browser was a dead-end. Nothing that Chrome or any other free browser wouldn't have put an end to later. Netscape was always going to die, short of pulling off a magic in-flight engine change to enterprise software (which they tried and failed at).
There's no chance Microsoft killed off more competitors in those days than Amazon has. How many small and mid size retailers has Amazon put under as it has added $100+ billion to its retail sales? Given the very low consumer & economic growth of the past decade, the tally would have to be thousands of businesses across the US. There are radically more retail stores of all sizes across the US than software companies. It's impossible for Microsoft to ever compete with the business rival destruction that Amazon must inherently cause as it grows ever larger. How many physical stores will Amazon destroy as it adds its next $100 billion in retail sales? It's not detracting from Walmart's sales, that's not shrinking, so it's coming from everybody else.