Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?

>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)

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?

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.

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.

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.