"We are not going to make any money by selling browsers, and I personally don’t think they are going to make any money from it either. If you can get a browser from Microsoft for free, why are you going to pay $39 to Netscape?"
The Herring: But if Navigator is platform-independent, and…
Jobs: But everybody uses Windows. Come on – 90%+ of the people use Windows, so 90%+ of the people are going to hook into the Internet using Microsoft. Now, you know me, I love the Mac too, but I am trying to be really objective here.
Netscape, as best i can tell, pretty much seeded the idea of using web tech on the office network.
And this was a direct threat to the market share of MS on that network.
Thus MS rolled out IIS and IE, with the latter working closely with the former (as was the case between Netscape Navigator and Enterprise server).
So in the end the "browser war" was a proxy war for the office network.
They could offer it for free all they want. Similar in the EU, they weren't against them for it being free, and once they stopped bundling it and windows media player, they were off the hook (even though they still offered them for free).
If all Microsoft had done is bundled a free browser with the OS, it would have never stood up in court in terms of anti-trust prosecution. It would have been a laughable case.
What the DOJ got them on, was restraint of trade issues with OEMs, restrictions on API access, deep integration of IE into the OS (lying about being able to remove it), and market place conduct through leveraging their monopoly, leading to (in the DOJ's opinion) harm to consumers. Microsoft also basically taunted the bull in the countless ways they tried to jam the government, the ways they acted like assholes at every turn (including to the judge), the quotes that came out on things they said about competition, etc. They ended up with nearly everyone against them and looked like the ultimate bullies. If you want to have a bad time, be a monopoly and pretend you're more powerful than the US Government, and pretend you can stone-wall them.
No, the only reason MS is suddenly bundling more, including Anti-Virus, is because the judgement expired in 2011.
>If you want to have a bad time, be a monopoly and pretend you're more powerful than the US Government,
Or from a realpolitik stance, if Netscape has more friends with the Clintons than you do (which they did), you're going to have a bad time. A lot of "careers" were made at the DoJ over this asinine case, that changed nothing for the better.
Bundling was the surface issue, but the antitrust violation was their undue exercise of monopoly power by refusing to let vendors bundle non-Microsoft software and using their Windows-compatible certification program as the stick to that particular carrot.
From Wikipedia on the settlement: "The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who will have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[24] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future."
Its kind of amusing that you point to such a "realpolitik" explanation and yet would leave out that the reason it changed almost nothing at all (for better or worse) was that the Bush Administration, which was more MS friendly, came to office at the end of the case, and the Bush Justice Department abandoned any effort toward imposing any significant sanctions.
The DOJ was against them as a result of abuse of monopoly power. Using their market dominance with Windows, they attempted to strangle out Firefox by demanding that their reselling partners would not also bundle Firefox on their Windows-based computers. If they did bundle Firefox, they would lose their Windows certification.
Free = allowed
Bundling = allowed
Monopoly = allowed
Leveraging partner relationships to unfairly disadvantage a competitor = antitrust violation.
Well, it's now been almost 20 years, and Microsoft has still never released what they claimed they were going to release and have us build on top of them.
So yeah, I have no love lost for Microsoft. Yet they're still not as evil as Google.
Nowadays Apple has a policy of banning all other web browsers and even program interpreters from its platform. This isn't really acceptable either, but there doesn't seem to be any prospect of doing anything about it.
Apple's position is essentially that iOS already has a perfectly good JavaScript engine (JavaScriptCore) and the security risks of allowing apps to use mprotect/mmap far outweigh the benefits of allowing other JS engines.
Its crazy that even today, diehards continue to misrepresent the DOJ prosecution of MS in the 1990s.
> Do you guys really want to pay for browsers or every single thing in a OS ala carte?
The basis for the DOJ prosecution of MS wasn't that it was illegal in general to include a browser or similar application as an included feature of an OS, it was that it was illegal for a market participant with monopoly power in a particular market to leverage that monopoly power in an effort to monopolize an existing distinct market.