Yeah, I still don't understand how Microsoft lost the suit back in the day just for including IE as a default web browser in windows, whereas apple can ban all web browsers but their own and it's fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
I'm wondering whether the cause was more "a new head of the relevant department had a different attitude towards antitrust enforcement" (or possibly even "a different attitude towards Microsoft") than "the prosecution realized how shaky the argumentation had been".
The EU decision actually had more teeth though.
As a side not, that Wikipedia article is far from neutral: > … Microsoft responded that the company would offer manufacturers a choice: one version of Windows that was obsolete, or another that did not work properly.
> Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his findings of fact on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86-based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Software, RealNetworks, Linux, and others.[5] Judgment was split in two parts. On April 3, 2000, he issued his conclusions of law, according to which Microsoft had committed monopolization, attempted monopolization, and tying in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.[17] Microsoft immediately appealed the decision.[18]
The government may have agreed to a settlement on appeal but Microsoft lost the initial suit.
> "Microsoft didn't lose any lawsuit in the US for for tying its web browser to Windows"
is false.
However, when most people discuss the result of a lawsuit you can generally infer they are referring to the ultimate decision after all appeals are exhausted (as opposed to any particular intermediate decision which could get reversed and then reversed again).
Since the appeals court overturned that particular claim, one could reasonably argue that the district judge ruled incorrectly, and in the eyes of the legal system Microsoft, did not, actually lose.
(Note that I am speaking here only in regards to the tying claim, as the appeals court did affirm that Microsoft lost on several of the other claims related to Windows licensing for OEMs.)
Suppose B was accused of murder, initially convicted, then exonerated on appeal.
“B is a convicted murderer; true or false?”
“B was convicted of murder; true or false?”
If your answers are “false to the first but true to the second”, I’d wager you are frequently misunderstood by other people in conversations.
"X was convicted for doing Y, but Z was not convicted for doing >>Y" is an interesting comparison, even if (or especially if) X later won an appeal.
Microsoft did lose the suit in 1999. They then appealed and settled with the DOJ a few years later.
90% marketshare that you don't utilize anticompetitively? Sounds great. 50% marketshare that you utilize anticompetitively particularly across other domains? That's an antitrust issue.
It's not. 50% market share is more than enough to have significant market power. Especially when the rest of the market is only a single company and barriers to entry are enormous. (Remember that Microsoft -- the company with 95% desktop market share -- tried and failed to enter this market.)
If they had any chutzpah, they would have continued plowing their billions in profit into improving their device, and coming out with innovations similar to Apple’s own chips.
Obviously, Microsoft’s C suite does not think their org can do better than collect the rent from Excel licenses and Azure.
Users don't want a phone with no apps, developers don't make apps for a phone with no users.
In some kind of theoretical sense it should be possible to overcome this with enough money. They could have given away a hundred million phones for nothing while making cash payments to app developers. It's an open question whether this would have cost them tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars.
What is not in question is that it is a crazy huge amount of money that maybe a half dozen companies in the world even have to throw around like that, one of them was Microsoft, and two of the others are Apple and Google. Apparently no one else is even interested in making the attempt.
There's also a significant question about what you do with that control when you have it.
For all their faults, Google and Apple haven't tried anything equivalent to that.
Google's repeatedly pushed Chrome-specific web “features” as the new way to do everything web. Sometimes they're also implemented in Firefox. Not equivalent, but similar.
I think what Microsoft was doing was objectionable in itself.
I think what Google is doing is objectionable to the extent that they try to use that control to prevent people doing things they dislike (eg, their recent work to undermine ad-blockers).
Chrome only runs on Windows, some Linuxs, and some BSDs. It includes DRM that only works on some processors… It looks like Google is trying to prevent the "web platform" from continuing to exist as a competitor to Chrome, and I don't see how that's any different.