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Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?

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Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?

#31

Post by hinkley »

asveikau wrote: post #6

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.

Not quite sure I agree with your order. They were caught flatfooted - famously so - on smart phones and tablets.

Firefox 2 and the iPhone came out about the same time. I think the one-two punch (and you can argue which is 1 and which is 2, but I'm not interested) was that on one side you had a device, populated by people with considerable disposable income, that couldn't run IE if you tried. That got the attention of management in ways us developers never could.

And on the other, you had a safe harbor for people who were up for a switch elsewhere. And it helped substantially that debugging was better on that alternative (developers would use Mozilla and Firefox for development whether management wanted FF support or not).

Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?

#32

Post by parasubvert »

techntoke wrote: post #13
zepto wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Who cares about this and how would it be in the public good?

Yet it is probably installed on over 95% of non-mac laptops.

There are 1.5 billion active Windows PCs, including laptops in the world. [1]

There are also 1.5 billion active Apple devices including Macs and tablets, and 2.5 billion active Google Android devices.

Given Linux and other computing devices to add to the above. Microsoft really has an only (at best!) a 25% share of the world of computing devices.

One can split hairs about being the monopoly leader in their niche, but the thing is... PCs and Macs aren’t the main form of computing anymore.

It would be hard to argue that Microsoft should be broken up because Windows is the future of the market and is illegally being exploited to sell more Azure, or Xboxes, or Microsoft Office, etc.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/bigger-than-windows-bigger-tha...

Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?

#33

Post by techntoke »

dvdcxn wrote: post #20
techntoke wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet it is probably installed on over 95% of non-mac laptops.

It's less of a walled garden than OSX, which isn't even virtualisable.

It actually can be virtualized, but it isn't as easy as Windows. I'd argue that neither of them should be used in government though.

Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?

#34

Post by bobthepanda »

the_watcher wrote: post #24
_bxg1 wrote: post #8

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 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.

Is it a monopoly, or a giant conglomerate? Because those are two different sets of problems.

Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?

#35

Post by Mountain_Skies »

_bxg1 wrote: post #8

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 democrac…

Didn't they kick Gab off of Azure because of objectionable content?

Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?

#36

Post by arcticbull »

the_watcher wrote: post #24
_bxg1 wrote: post #8

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 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.

I assume by "take seriously" the poster meant that their marketshare was pretty insignificant along all axes. The Apple App Store has a 100% market share of the iPhone app market and by proxy has control of all apps on 90% of the entire revenue in the smartphone space. Microsoft Store has ... nothing.

Bing has 33% market share in the US an 9% globally. That's not a monopoly.

A monopoly has to control an overwhelming amount of a given market, not just be big.

Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?

#37

Post by [deleted] »

calais wrote: post #10

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?

#38

Post by jay_kyburz »

mrweasel wrote: post #26
omarhaneef wrote: post #7

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)

>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.…

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)

Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?

#39

Post by just_myles »

_bxg1 wrote: post #8

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 democrac…

Microsoft is no stranger to that discussion. Echoing back to the early days of internet browsers and PC bundling.

Re: Why Don’t People Talk About Breaking Up Microsoft?

#40

Post by notahacker »

irrational wrote: post #5

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.

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...

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