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Comment by Gunax | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with the article at all.

I think it's equating two very different anti-trust cases. Apple maintains control of what its users can install on their own devices--Microsoft never did that.

Just offering a free software should not be considered anti-trust. For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire?

Now if Microsoft had restricted users from installing another browser in Windows, then I would agree it's anti-competitive. And this is much more akin to what Apple is doing.

The author wants to paint MS as hypocritical, but aside from being accused of anti-competitive practices, there are no similarities.

And second, I despise how one's deposition attitude plays so much into the media's narrative. It doesn't matter if Gates was kind or rude, agreeable or flippant, sloppy or well-dressed. The only that that matters are legal facts.

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> For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire?

There was a reason it was browsers.

At the time there was rather a lot of software written against the Win32 API and nothing else. It was a moat. You needed that software, so you needed Windows. The web threatened to bridge the moat -- if people write web applications for Netscape, and Netscape runs on not only Windows but Mac and Solaris and everything else, no more moat.

So the strategy with Internet Explorer was to make it the dominant browser on Windows (which was 90% of desktops), and then add all kinds of IE-specific features and get web developers to use them, so their web pages only worked in IE. Then the user gets a dependency on a web page with an Active X control that runs on Wintel but not Mac/PowerPC or Solaris/SPARC, so they have to use Windows. And they have to use IE, which enables more web developers to target IE instead of open standards.

The problem wasn't that it was free. The problem was that it was free and non-standard and the non-standard bits were tied to Windows.

That's a pretty poor argument for govt intervention. Why? Because all of that Windows-only stuff existed, and the market ultimately rejected it. ActiveX controls? Yeah I remember those. Same with Java applets, Flash, Silverlight. The government didn't need to get involved in getting rid of any of these.

At the time, both Java and standards-compliant browsers posed major threats to Microsoft, and Microsoft did a pretty good job of messing up both. Only in distant hindsight do ActiveX and MSFT's hobbled 1.1 JVM seem inconsequential.

Neither Java nor "standards-based browsers" are things the govt has any role or authority to protect. The govt (via anti-trust law) breaks up established monopolies, and very rarely.

In fact, if Microsoft was indeed threatened by a programming language, or by a couple of nerdy academics (not even a company), that would greatly weaken the govt's case that they were a dominant monopoly.

Kind of a strawman argument by dint of hyper-narrow focus, isn't it? Sure, there are no laws granting the government authority or duty to nurture Java or browsers; however, what Microsoft did more generally was to squash potential competition by leveraging their extremely entrenched OS monopoly.

Java is (or was) much more than a programming language. Rather it was viewed as something more like an operating system. Write once run everywhere, etc. By comparison I don't imagine Microsoft worried much about Pascal or Delphi.

Further, it seems... difficult to argue that a company that crushes nascent threats can't be a monopoly.

> hyper-narrow focus

Lol -- you chose to focus on those 2 specific items, not me.

> squash potential competition

Virtually every single feature of Microsoft desktop OS'es could potentially be provided by an alternative provider. Many were and still are -- disk defragmentation, disk compression, anti-virus, firewall, web server, ftp client, image editing, database drivers, etc etc. People used to pay money for 3rd party utilities to expand beyond DOS's 640kb RAM limit... should Windows be prevented from handling memory management in order to not suppress competition? Seems like the most basic function of an OS. Early on, you couldn't print a spreadsheet in landscape mode without a 3rd-party utility... should the government disallow Windows from enabling landscape printing? Does Putty have an anti-competitive claim now that ssh is included in recent versions of Windows 10? How about accessibility features... should disabled individuals be denied use of standard Windows releases because the inclusion of a screen reader, magnification, etc would be anti-competitive with commercial alternatives?

> crushes nascent threats

Microsoft "crushed" neither Java nor web standards, both of which are doing fine and outlasted Internet Explorer, the focus of the government's case. Most of the problems Java does have, starting with poor stewardship, are entirely Sun/Oracle's own making.

Microsoft was working on the .NET framework to beat Java. They had J++ to replace Java which became J# and then C#. I think they got sued over it being too much like Java and had to change it.

Now Microsoft has open sourced .Net to run many languages on different platforms.

ActiveX controls were rejected, in part, because Microsoft lost their antitrust case and had controls placed on them by the federal government.

It's easy to say that now in hindsight. Wasn't that clear back then.

Of course. But it strengthens the argument. The govt's job is not to guess what might happen or how the market will react to new technology. It should only intervene as a last resort, when there is absolutely no market-based solution possible. It wasn't like the AT&T antitrust suit, where the defendant had existed, mostly unchanged, for 50 or so years.

The antitrust suit is a big part of why the web succeeded to the extent it did.

It requires zero malice and zero plans to dominate the market to add ActiveX to IE. I have 1000s of plugins (which MS and partners did via OLE/COM etc...) and a new tech becomes popular (browsers) then it would be obvious to pretty much any engineer that I'd want to find a way make it possible to use those plugins in a browser.

There's no need to make up some story about them doing it to force people to be Windows only.

The same stuff applies all over. Why did Apple use Objective C as the core way to interact with MacOS X? To the person that distrusts Apple they'll claim it is solely to lock in developers. Some developer makes an app in Objective C, it's too much work to port. I'm pretty sure though the charitable view is it was inherited from NextStep. The person that distrusts Apple will still claim it was a choice that Apple could have chose something more compatible but stuck with it because it had lock-in benefits.

I agree. Microsoft's strongest argument was that the features of an "OS" are fluid, ever-evolving, and un-definable. OS'es were all text-based, until one day they weren't and the GUI dominated. Win 95 had no Winsock or TCP/IP stack built-in, 98 did. File Explorer. Start Button. And as you say, the presence of MS Paint and the Calculator and Solitaire show that exact inclusions/exclusions are arbitrary. MS could have argued that it was it's responsibility -- obligation even -- to add new features and abilities to its OSes. Force the govt to "prove" that a browser is definitely an application and somehow cannot be a core part of the OS (otherwise there's no "bundling"). They wouldn't have been able to do that.

I think 3.11 still needed a third party TCP/IP stack, not 95.

> It doesn't matter if Gates was kind or rude

The legal system is made of people, and people are exquisitely sensitive to social stuff. It's just not expedient to ignore that.

On that front, you could argue that using tone and posture could be used as a deflection. Discussions around the case will often dedicate some of the time discussing this tone and posture. This makes it easier to claim that the opposition is biased against Gates over something that shouldn't matter.

You must not have had a Mac in the IE era. Many websites were inaccessible to those who did. The web was not open in those days.

> The web was not open in those days

(Genuine) question: is the web open now?

Nearly everybody I know who lived through that trial and works in the internet biz has eventually concluded that MSFT did the right think bundling IE in the OS. (I've had that discussion with a lot of people after somebody asked me point blank exactly what was wrong with including a DLL that did HTTP GETs and showed the results graphically on screen in an OS).

Another thing I've learned is that modern CEOs are now expected to both be sucessfull businesspeople, and also humane enough to look good in a deposition and be skilled at deflecting questions.

> Apple maintains control of what its users can install on their own devices--Microsoft never did that.

Well apart from the OS installed on the device you are buying from an OEM.

Between secureboot disabling, mokutil, and Microsoft signing Ubuntu and Red Hat kernels directly, I think it's pretty clear there's no desire for lock-in and that it's actually a security feature.

I'm talking about the 90s.

"...then I would agree it's anti-competitive."

Using dominance in one market to muscle into another is bog standard monopolistic practice, and nominally prohibited.

Conflating bundling with other anti-competitive strategies is unhelpful.

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