My guess is because they've been marketing themselves extra well lately and tech folks are eating it up.
But the "tech folks" are not the ones who are talking about breaking up tech companies, pundits are.
Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?
21–30 of 75 posts
Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?
#22Isn'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.
So we didn't need regulation to erode its market stranglehold after all and it was just good fashion competition? :)
Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?
#23Having a monopoly is not illegal. Abusing that monopoly power to take over other markets is.
Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?
#241) 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 democrac…
> 1) Nobody takes the Microsoft Store seriously
> 2) People barely take Bing seriously
The problem with using these as factors in dismissing a monopoly (or the converse) is that it's simply declaring that being really good at a thing by definition makes you a monopoly.
Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?
#25>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 eMarke…
>I mean, trying to keep a secret cabal among journalists must be pretty tough
It does not have to be a 'secret cabal', just a group of like-minded individuals soft-coordinating their responses. JournoList [0] has existed for three years before being made public. When exposure forced JournoList to close, the response from the members was immediately to create another group like it [1]. What also telling is that the members don't think of themselves being a part of 'secret cabal', which allows for the double-think of coordinating responses while being sincerely sure they do no such thing [ibid.].
JournoList is not just an isolated example. There was at least GameJournoPros (no good source link unfortunately), explicitly modeled after JournoList and it's safe to assume that many more exist.
[0] :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList
[1] :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList#Cabalist_spin-off
Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?
#26The 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)
>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.
Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?
#27The 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…
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.
Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?
#28Isn'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.
So we didn't need regulation to erode its market stranglehold after all and it was just good fashion competition? :)
It would have been hard to predict that in the 1990s though. I certainly did not.
Also we cannot measure to what extent the DOJ probe and its aftereffects distracted Microsoft from further dominance and led it to not compete as well. So maybe in some form the regulation did it in after all.
Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Who cares about this and how would it be in the public good?
So that more secure implementations than MS's can offer a transition for organizations dependent on it.
Microsoft has one of the best software security teams in the world, one that arguably created the template that Google and Apple used to create the other best security teams in the industry. The idea that a Microsoft breakup would have improved computer security is an extraordinary claim.
Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?
#30Isn'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.
Except they still control the OS market.
> Except they still control the OS market.
So is MS disturbing macOS competition? I guess not much. And don't forget that MS only have strong consumer OS market share, not entire OS.