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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?

#61

Post by joelx »

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 there is a strong and concerted attack on our best companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. This is being financed by truly evil actors. Please notice that no one talks about the dictatorships rising around the world in Russia, China, Venezuela, and elsewhere. Notice that no one is really taking on the big oil and coal companies that have caused climate change.

Instead people are targeting young companies that are making the world better for minor infractions.

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

#62

Post by audiolover »

erklik wrote: post #47
asveikau wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To add to this:

Science? HPC? Hardware? Web? DIY? These "niches" (which are actually huge) are dominated by Linux.

You'll be actually laughed out of the room if you talked about using Windows here, and mac is not even remotely present.

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

#63

Post by erklik »

audiolover wrote: post #62
erklik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

To add to this: Science? HPC? Hardware? Web? DIY? These "niches" (which are actually huge) are dominated by Linux. You'll be actually laughed out of the room if you talked about using Windows here, and mac is not even remotely present.

> Science? HPC? Hardware? Web? DIY? These "niches" (which are actually huge) are dominated by Linux.

Yup. To add to that, IoT is also dominated by Linux. which number around 30 Billion connected devices worldwide. That's completely Linux.

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

#64

Post by techntoke »

audiolover wrote: post #62
erklik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

To add to this: Science? HPC? Hardware? Web? DIY? These "niches" (which are actually huge) are dominated by Linux. You'll be actually laughed out of the room if you talked about using Windows here, and mac is not even remotely present.

Maybe some people in the science and HPC community, but I find a lot of developers and people at meetups surrounding Linux technologies are often using Macs. Red Hat notoriously employees a lot of people that don't even use Linux. I personally use Arch Linux. You can't really compare something that is open source though and very modular, to something like Windows though.

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

#65

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #60
calais wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, "weird" is the wrong word. You're right, I do understand where it's coming from. A thing I'd add is that the Microsoft case didn't just chasten Microsoft, but also the industry as a whole. In at least a couple of FAANG cases, I know firsthand that antitrust concerns altered product decisions (sometimes for the worse!). I don't think the case was, in the industry, widely considered a win for Microsoft.

[deleted]

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

#66

Post by yread »

nine_k wrote: post #41
calais wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OK, now do the same for LinkedIn and GitHub

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

#67

Post by xref »

yread wrote: post #66
nine_k wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OK, now do the same for LinkedIn and GitHub

Not sure if that’s a question or an agreement with the parent?

GitHub is of course one of many, gitlab, bitbucket, or self-hosted being common alts.

Same with LinkedIn, it’s just social media like Facebook/Twitter/reddit but emphasizes biz

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

#68

Post by scarface74 »

arcticbull wrote: post #36
the_watcher wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

And every console maker has 100% share of their app markets. Should we break them up to?

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

#69

Post by mwcampbell »

tptacek wrote: post #54
calais wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can reasonably disagree about the quality of their security. More generally though tech diversity makes a difference in security: Dan Geer did an excellent talk about this.

What Dan Geer & co wrote about software monocultures is pretty much the last thing anyone seriously wrote about the topic, which hasn't had much predictive power in the ensuing years. The major bastions of software security on the Internet today --- Apple's iOS hardware/software platform, and Google's Chromium --- are both monocultures, and selecting yourself out of either of them will materially reduce your security…

So what do we do if we want to oppose monocultures on principle? Clearly we can't just bury our heads in the sand and deny the truth you've presented here. Maybe the key is to make it easier to develop secure software, so one doesn't need a security team the size of Microsoft's, Apple's, or Google's. So I'm glad Mozilla is introducing more and more Rust into Firefox.
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