An oral history of the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit
theringer.com
theringer.com
Has Gates ever come out and acknowledged that his actions at that time were wrong?
In retrospect it's kind of amazing that the government even took the actions they did there. It's hard to imagine today. The article touches on it, but the big companies seem to have wizened up to it. They don't need or want complete control, they just want control of their customers. Every once in awhile they'll send off a 1984-ish salvo against each other, but actually outright winning is too costly. It's way too productive to just screw over customers, and they all do it, because they can.
The discussion about Google and others at the end is interesting:
He understood completely what Microsoft was doing, and, as I like to say, there are only about eight plays in the monopolist’s playbook. He saw all of them. So that when he got market power [as the CEO of Google], he could execute those same kinds of exclusionary plays and he knew exactly what to do. He knew what worked for Microsoft and what didn’t. It’s a very, very parallel situation. … There are no coincidences here.
Unfortunately with government as it is in the US, it's probably not going to save us. It's going to take new, better companies to beat the current giants. Hopefully some of you are trying.
As an aside, this video of the Windows 95 launch is great. Ballmer is naturally acting like an idiot, but there's Gates in the background, so seemingly mild, but whom was in fact one of the most cutthroat businessmen in the world
Gates is highly celebrated now, but it seems like he was the furthest thing from a fair and honest competitor. If Gates and Ballmer had their way, I don't want to even imagine what the internet would look like today.
The antitrust case didn't have much to do with Microsoft's loss of dominance to Google, Apple, Amazon and FB.
Compared to Uber, Google, Facebook and Theranos, Gates and co are saints. The standard for "evil" has shifted a lot since the 90s, now those look like innocent times!
Could it be worse than the bloated javascript ad-ridden social media hellscape we have today? All Microsoft "did" to the internet was abandon development on their dominant browser as a way to keep developers on the Windows platform. And lo-and-behold, _market forces_ foiled their plans on that one, not the government.
If anything did the internet in, it was the iPhone and the mass adoption of smartphones afterwards, which brought in untold numbers of tech-illiterate consumers to be easily exploited by our current crop of Evil Tech Companies.
Most things people say about HN comments aren't true in general, but only of the subset of comments that the person happens to notice. And we notice the things we dislike way more than we notice everything else.
This is just how the game is played because that's how it has always been played. It's not very imaginative if we assume that maximizing profit is truly the requirement of all companies, because it's not.
There's also nothing that says that customer satisfaction and profit aren't mutual, it's just many companies lean towards profit.
But Amazon isn't exactly the model of treating thier warehouse workers well.
Having watched the game from a front row seat, there was no honor in what he did, not just to Netscape, but to everyone that crossed his path. I was embarrassed for him on numerous occasions. The usual yardstick by which we measure success is monetary, and by that measure Gates is one of the best, as a person he left more than a lot to be desired. He is currently doing good work, but he still leaves a lot to be desired as a humanitarian, it's more self serving than it should be, but than again, Gates just wants to let us all know that it's his world and we are just living in it.
It takes a certain personality type to step on the throat of a tiny competitor just because you want an extra dollar or two of profit, I'm not referring to Netscape in this example. Of course I can't imagine how Larry Ellison would have acted had he Microsoft's monopoly, that thought really makes me shudder, and I got to see Larry up close and personal as well.
Gates did what the government allowed him to do, he was able to exploit IBM's former monopoly and create a new monopoly.
I can rarely discern my own motives for an action with any great certainty, impressive that you're so accurately able to assess his.
Like all oral histories, this one has its tribal roots. One of the distinct features of Microsoft is that Silicon Valley venture capital wasn't involved. In part because Microsoft isn't a Silicon Valley company and hence not a Silicon Valley success story. In fact it is the worst kind of not-a-Silicon-Valley success story. It made 10,000 ordinary employees millionaire or better rich, the founders even richer, and Silicon Valley venture capital standing outside, noses pressed against the glass.
The laissez-faire/libratarian/randian Silicon Valley business culture celebrating Microsoft's anti-trust as a morality play is perfectly titrated irony. Or sour grapes.
soft-pedalling here much? The founder became THE RICHEST man in THE WORLD for TWENTY+ straight years. Any other large sources of income, in say, the entire world?
M$FT under the shark-like junior managers became close to a Mafia, using threats, law-suits and marketing soft-money bribery to run roughshod over an industry. Buying and killing companies by the dozen, or simply crushing them for bragging rights at the golf course well after monopoly power was in effect.
The defense of 10,000 engineers got rich has a bad smell to it, considering there are now 2.5 million programmers in the US alone and who-knows-how-many worldwide. Look at the leadership and the actions, as well as the booty.
Sure there was some degree of villainy, but nothing compared to the kind perpetrated by less famous companies that pollute and/or murder. Microsoft's evil was the kind of first-world problem that we love to get distracted by. Conversely, Gates' charity mostly affects people the "developed" countries like to ignore/exploit.
Nobody made companies sell to Microsoft.
Nor how David Boies went from there to representing SCO. Or how SCO counsel and execs alike avoided contempt of court, with their own shenanigans. Getting caught lying to a jury is one thing, lying to the judge...
As someone who was at Microsoft during this era and down in Silicon Valley in the 2000's, I'm very much glad that it did happen. Although I did make money while I was at Microsoft, it's difficult for me to imagine how the things I worked on after I left (such as an early consumer smartphone) would have been possible with Microsoft at full strength.
I had both installed for a while, and finally deleted the Netscape one. Nobody coerced me.