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Comment by dpweb | Hacker News Reader

OP is dreaming. The US has perhaps never been more pro-business, hands off, and unwilling to do any anti-trust, than they are now. They will not be breaking up any companies any time soon. A 1990s Microsoft anti-trust case, you wont see.

In fact I think we’ll see corporations increasing their influence. acting as banks, keeping private armies, controlling political affairs.

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> The US has perhaps never been more pro-business, hands off, and unwilling to do any anti-trust, than they are now.

Well let's consult history, shall we?

You must mean other than the first 160 or so years of the country's existence, when the US operated as something dramatically closer to a free market, there were few regulations, few taxes, no welfare state, very few state interventions into the economy, few or no national business or economic-related laws, etc.

And the MS case resulted in basically a flick on the wrist, nothing else.

It definitely slowed them down a lot. Things could be looking very different if there had been no action.

Like what? Pretty baseless claim without examples.

For example they had to decouple their browser from the OS. In Europe they were forced to offer alternative browsers.

I also wonder if their investment in Apple was at least in part motivated by them being investigated. There may be no Apple today without that.

I think the EU was right to do it, because they realised how important the web is. But we didn't really feel the effects. Normal people still used IE, until they didn't.

In the end, I think Microsoft brought the demise of IE on themselves, because of how terrible it was. They couldn't undo that reputation, not even with Edge, which still feels clunky compared to FF or Chrome.

So this example is ambiguous w.r.t. hands-off vs. hands-on regulation at best.

It was not only about the browser as such but a lot of APIs were connected to IE. I don't remember the details but on several projects I worked on you needed IE installed to do stuff that was unrelated to the browser.

Also, Gates's reputation took a big hit with his behavior during the Congress hearings.

All this together caused a lot of harm to MS's image which may not have happened without the DOJ and the EU going after them.

Yeah, they might not have made that investment in Apple in 1997 -- where would they be today with no Apple?

That was driven by an Apple lawsuit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micr....

MSFT was always about owning the platform. All platforms. The writing was on the wall about mobile devices overtaking desktops/laptops - as it took time for the telcoms to build out faster wireless networks.

Windows CE was supposed to be where iOS and Android are in 2018. They blew that plain and simple.

I'm no iPhone fan, its overpriced and overhyped as a computing device IMO. But, the watershed moment that created today'd mass computing - was the invention of the iPhone. It just obliterated Palm and the WinCE alternatives of the time.

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