Microsoft didn't blink until acround 2008 when the EU cases finally fined them enough that they blinked. See, for example, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-eu/eu-fines-mic....
This started a wave of lobbying and PR campaigns from industry groups that lasted until ~2013 or so stating that the EU was going to use its leverage its power to "issue fines to extract the wealth of American tech companies because there aren't enough European ones". Worded more eloquently (though I can't recall exactly how, I think they may have said something about the "EU Technology Tax" or something as an allusion to this), but never the less, its what they were conveying
This was targeted at gaining sympathy for the US government to intervene with the EU to make it more friendly for American tech companies, and more specifically, big ones.
I wish I could find the webpage ads I saw around this. It was not a good look.
The EU still doesn't have (almost) any big tech companies, and they still regularly issue 9 or 10 figure fines to US tech companies.
Its not a conspiracy. US tech companies just keep blatantly disobeying EU law regarding personal data. A few years ago GDPR fines were so low many companies just paid them rather than comply with the law. It makes sense if the fines are much bigger now - large fines are (apparently) needed to bring companies to heel.
If you want to avoid the fines, try complying with the law.
I know people complain about the GDPR, but the requirements seems much less obnoxious to me than what adtech companies keep doing. I don't want facebook and friends to track me all over the web and sell that information to the highest bidder. I'm with the EU - these practices should be illegal.
Cookie banners are only needed when the website is doing something a bit dodgy - like behavior tracking for ads. Unfortunately, odious stuff is so ubiquitous that people think the banners must be necessary, and they blame the EU for insisting on popups instead of blaming the adtech companies for vomiting their crap into every website.
Basically if we had videos of Pichai stuttering and unsuccessfully trying to weasel out of sharp questions in every news report for a couple of weeks that would perhaps open more eyes and hurt Google more than a fine of so many zeroes.
Yeah, like Trump's Access Hollywood tape...
At that huge scale whatever topic except for maybe CP ends up becoming a 50-50 split with fans loving the character and his brand even more and haters conversely hating it even more too.
That's because when people that you normally hate side against [insert divisive character] then the choice is to automatically jump on his bandwagon and viceversa. So at such scales it rapidly escalates to a 50-50 split or thereabout.
The best you can do is to have some sort of marginal victory against the character in a winner take all settings (such as an election or a supreme court ruling) and hope it demoralizes him.
Like when Trump lost the Presidency he was demoralized and disappeared for a while, but had he kept his morale high he'd have been the Monday Morning armchair shadow President critiquing and undermining everything Biden did from his Twitter account addressing to the 70M people who voted for him
Because that definitely worked with Microsoft, right?
I don't think most Americans could tell you what Netscape is, let alone why Microsoft was sued or why it should have been humiliating.
Microsoft felt that it had won the browser wars so thoroughly that they dismantled most of their IE team and took their eyes off the ball. Nobody else could make a competitive browser, and therefore nobody could add browser features that would undermine the importance of Windows for applications. They didn't realize that they already had added the key feature for the Outlook team.
The first real use of XMLHttpRequest was Gmail in 2004. Most people just thought of it as a cute trick. It wasn't until Google Maps and the coining of the term AJAX that people thought differently. Microsoft, of course, had already been hit with the 2004 EU decree, and kept its eyes off the ball. By the time Microsoft paid attention, everyone was using it, Firefox was competitive with IE, Safari wasn't too far behind, and Google was already working on Chrome. But by then it was too late. Microsoft didn't have the IE team, and had been shocked at the EU penalties.
Therefore I give the credit for Microsoft not crushing Google to the EU antitrust, and not the USA antitrust. Which really did have no teeth. As can be seen by their efforts to anticompetitively promote Windows Media Player.
[0]: Though it was called ActiveXObject for a time
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090130092236/http://www.alexho...
Right. Gary Reback, the lawyer for Netscape back then, has said that Google's very existence depends on the Microsoft trial.
As for Americans' ignorance: irrelevant. They can't tell you what Watergate was, either.
Here was the position that I had then. Microsoft's documented behavior on previous antitrust cases meant that this settlement would not deter future abuse. And I laid out specifically why that decree would not work.
I stand by that opinion now.
I argued circa 2001-2002 that Microsoft had a history of legal brinkmanship and continued anticompetitive behavior through past consent decrees, and nothing in the Netscape decision would dissuade them.
The EU case in 2004-2008 demonstrated that, following the Netscape decision, Microsoft had not been dissuaded. They continued their anticompetitive behavior and legal brinkmanship, and this was confirmed by internal emails. This fact was why the EU penalties were so high. The judge explicitly wished the fines to be sufficient that Microsoft could not continue to view antitrust consent decrees as just a cost of doing business.
His argument that Microsoft was dissuaded is indeed a counterfactual argument. It is a counterfactual argument that contradicts facts established in later court cases.
This is why, over 20 years later, I stand by my previous belief. I think that my reasoning then was sound. And my predictions were validated by evidence introduced in later cases.
There are good reasons to have open proceedings but providing the public more opportunities to spin sound bites into hate-mobbing isn't one of them.
It wasn't like their antitrust history started with browsers. Their business practices were on display before - for instance look at the 1994 consent decree that they signed. Or did you think that Netscape was their first antitrust case?
I'm aware that Microsoft and Google still have massive marketshare, but there's no way of knowing what the world would look like if that lawsuit hadn't happened. They technically lost in the legal court, but internally may have been congratulating themselves because the penalty was so small.
But they lost in the court of public opinion. "Everyone knows" that Microsoft's modus operandi is "Embrace, extend, extinguish" monopoly-building, that IE sucks, that their entire platform is anti-user...it's taken decades of brilliant work on VS Code, on the .NET stack, and in other open source efforts to partially convince some of the developer community that they're not entirely evil. And honestly, Microsoft's character in all of this is a big part of why I daily Firefox on a Linux laptop, and probably a big part of why tools like Firefox and Linux exist. A significant portion of Google's success may be due to people leaving Microsoft's IE (and Bing) and using Chrome instead!
Here, "Don't be evil" Google - already somewhat maligned by their Adsense tracking cookies, their gradual degradation of the Search experience, their habit of canceling beloved projects, their own embrace/extend/extinguish model with Chrome, and their other actions, could suffer a similar character impeachment in this antitrust trial.
It doesn't matter as much whether industry insiders knew what their behavior was, or whether they take a financial hit, or even whether they're found guilty - what matters most is what popular culture paints them to be.
The general public of people our age thinks good things about Microsoft. Even my siblings find my dislike of Microsoft bizarre. The only thing about Microsoft that most people my age ever hated was Clippy. And even Clippy is now generally liked.
And developers under 35 seem to find it bizarre that if I call Microsoft the Evil Empire. Just as I once found it strange that developers from the 1980s thought of IBM that way.
They definitely took a huge hit in public opinion. I'm from a middle of nowhere town, its not tech adjacent or focused, and these were common online forums where we interacted at the time (and by some extension the broader public ones).
Even teachers would poke fun at Microsoft from time to time, as I recall
Same for MS, it's not an accident that even non-technical folk moved onto chrome away from IE/Edge even though IE had huge marketshare at one point.
The bigger factor is that smartphones allowed competitors to get a reset on the playing field for the consumer market.
Mac marketshare was in single digits until the iPhone took hold (yes, even after the success of the iPod), and we still had Microsoft dominating the market with over 80% marketshare as of 2018 (macOS has only hit double digit marketshare percentage as of about 2016, roughly doubling to over 20% from that time until today).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
As an edit, maybe I’d add factor number 3: web-based business applications. I would say that Google’s business productivity suite set businesses free to be much more platform agnostic, along with other tools that moved from installed desktop applications to web.
Microsoft has grown to a $2.3T company today. Nothing more needs be said.
It was in 2007 that the founder of this site and its associated venture capital wrote "Microsoft is Dead":
Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared.
But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous.
<http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770>
Of course, Microsoft did not in fact die, and it remains part of FAANG (or MAAMA, or whatever we're calling them these days), but the company did see a substantial decline by any number of measures (fear, market cap, reputation, market domination) through the aughts and well into the teens.
Google and Facebook and Amazon emerged, Apple (all but dead itself by the late 1990s) had one of the most phenomenal come-backs of any company ever. And when we talk of market domination today, the first names off peoples lips or fingertips are more likely Google and Facebook and Amazon than Microsoft. It's their market spaces which are most resistant to serious rivalry, whilst Microsoft scrambles for the scraps of desktop and tries to establish itself in the Cloud. The areas it had tried to dominate: commerce, Web search, handhelds, and even office software, are owned, or at least strongly contested (in the last instance) by others.
I'm not saying that Microsoft is redeemed (I don't think it is), or that it's well behaved (dittos). But the unrestrained malevolence it exhibited through the mid-1990s is mostly tamped down strongly.