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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?

#41

Post by nine_k »

calais wrote: post #15
_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…

Antitrust law isn't a tool to secure democracy but to secure competition. I don't think the worry is about actions taken by Microsoft hurting democracy; the concern is MS systems being insecure owing to a lack of competitive pressure and, as a consequence, being vulnerable to democracy-disrupting attacks.

Lack of competitive pressure?

You can run a few Linux distros as a reasonable desktop OS, with corporate support and all, if you want.

You can run Apple machines and software for desktop computing, as many companies do.

On servers, Windows is a minority.

MS Office is, of course, a one of a kind thing. Still it's interoperable with other software, within reason, and just reaps the benefits of the network effect, much as other specialized "industry standard" software.

As a monopoly, MS's position is weak now.

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

#42

Post by [deleted] »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #12
sli wrote: post #3

My guess is because they've been marketing themselves extra well lately and tech folks are eating it up.

This. All that tech people see is Microsoft positioning itself as this open and FOSS friendly company. But this is just a tiny fraction of what they do and mostly fuelled by a tiny fraction of their employees. The corporate facing rest hasn't changed a bit. Quite the contrary. Their licensing has become even more opaque, their overreach regarding what they shove down user's throats has increased, and you can't be sur…

[deleted]

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

#43

Post by parasubvert »

Because PCs and Office productivity software are a niche, and it’s hard to argue their market leadership in a niche is being illegally exploited to take over other markets.

What markets? Well, the only one that matters right now is cloud, as it’s gradually eating the entire enterprise software and hardware industry, with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake.

Put another way, Microsoft certainly bought their #2 position in cloud with Azure by being early to market relative to Google, but also by having a huge sales field with Microsoft Windows/Office licensing true-ups to use as discount incentive to buy Azure credits.

Is this illegal? It would be a difficult argument to say so. Given Google’s position with search and Android, Amazon’s market position in cloud, Microsoft is a middle pack player everywhere now. Huge, but middle of the pack.

The only argument that holds some water (per this article) is that Microsoft is big, and big is bad for consumers, therefore, they shouldn’t be big. But it’s vague and really would depend on the judge hearing the case. Amazon has the same argument against it as with Microsoft, but it would be hard to prove they’re harming consumers.

Windows use has very little ability to drive Azure adoption beyond pure financial sales games - you give me a few percentage points more off Windows and Office and I’ll buy some of your Azure. That’s common in any sort of industry transition. Oracle is doing the same thing just very late, with a questionable service and with less success. IBM too.

What’s interesting is most posters in this thread are still fighting 20 year old battles. PCs are maybe 27-28% of the market of computing devices these days. The battle has moved on to cloud services (Amazon being the far away leader) and mobile devices (mostly setted there too, by Google, though Apple’s iOS business alone is larger than all of Microsoft).

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

#44

Post by rdtsc »

> Or perhaps Microsoft has successfully avoided receiving the same level of antitrust scrutiny as the Big Four because it is neither primarily consumer-facing like Apple or Amazon nor does it operate a platform with a significant amount of political speech via user-generated content (UGC) like Facebook or Google (YouTube).

I can see it being that. MS is not as much in the business of manufacturing consent, using Chomsky and Herman's famous book title. But, all those other companies do it to some extent, though, maybe Apple less so. The journalists from traditional media see these companies eating their lunch, so to speak, and they've been taking jabs at them periodically.

Regular consumers, perhaps mostly the conservative ones, also think they are being manipulated so it resonates with them. So in a way the tech companies managed to make enemies on both sides of the aisle. However, I imagine they'll be fine. I don't see any of them actually getting broken up, especially when they've been spending close to $20M/year in lobbying https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000067823.

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

#46

Post by wardbradt »

dblohm7 wrote: post #23

Having a monopoly is not illegal. Abusing that monopoly power to take over other markets is .

I initially thought you were wrong, but you are not.

“Monopolization” [0], which a Wikipedia section on “Sherman Act of 1890” [1] lead me to, is maintaining a monopoly “through conduct deemed unlawfully exclusionary. The mere fact that conduct disadvantages rivals does not... constitute... exclusionary conduct.”

I am most surprised that the Sherman Act explicitly targets monopolization, not monopolies.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolization

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

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

#47

Post by erklik »

asveikau wrote: post #19
techntoke wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they still control the OS market.

Including macOS, iOS, android, chromeos, linux? (Laugh at the last one if you must, but it is more viable today than it was in the 1990s chiefly because platform agnostic web based content is more normal in niches formerly occupied by Win32.)

> linux? (Laugh at the last one if you must, but it is more viable today than it was in the 1990s chiefly because platform agnostic web based content is more normal in niches formerly occupied by Win32.)

and is also used on the majority of non-personal computers in the world. That's not some small number and a very large market share.

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

#48

Post by calais »

tptacek wrote: post #27
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…

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 m…

What Wikipedia records about it is precisely all I knew about it. Thank you for the exposition and commentary.

I don't think Linux nerds' taking the case personally is weird, though: antagonism towards Microsoft specifically is a cultural self definition for many of them. As with any court case that parallels a cultural narrative, it was felt personally.

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

#49

Post by asveikau »

hinkley wrote: post #31
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…

I think one-two punch is a good way to put it, and that they complemented each other, and continue to do so in the present. It used to be viable to have Windows-only web content or something only accessible on a Win32 application. iOS and android helped us get away from that reality.

Of course you could look at the App Store and Play and say that potential for new entrants is now blocked somewhere else...

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

#50

Post by Mountain_Skies »

A related question, should Microsoft voluntary split or at least spinoff some parts of the company that are no longer complimentary to each other? They seem to be charging towards being mostly a cloud services company. Some of their assets might be more valuable on their own or in the hands of another company.
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