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Comment by jstclair | Hacker News Reader

You're not the only one who was there. And some of us discrete with your interpretation(s). When Microsoft included TCP/IP in Win3.11 for Workgroups, they killed a lot of proprietary, expensive products. Should that have triggered an anti-trust investigation, too?

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Did Windows having TCP/IP break my ability to put my SunOS boxes on the internet? Because IE4's crushing dominance sure broke my ability to use a lot of the web from my Linux box in 2001. MS never would have gotten that market share for IE without leveraging their monopoly position in windows.

I don't really want to rehearse that argument again; and this seems to be waaaaay outside the scope of the original post. And, incidentally, nice moving-the-goalposts - you avoided the question of whether putting Trumpet Winsock et al. out-of-business to incorporate what we all consider to be part of the OS should have also been considered illegal.

You're right that this is increasingly a digression. I thought my point was more important, but I'll play on your field: Trumpet Winsock was shipping the same BSD code that everyone else was using, and built a business around it only because MS didn't bother to. When MS took the same code for themeslves, the market for proprietary products evaporated. Where is the "harm to the market" in that? Users got compatible software at a better price.

When Netscape was killed, Unix users lost the ability to use much of the web, because everyone started writing to IE only. And the reason that happened was because MS leveraged their windows monopoly illegally. I note you didn't have a reply to this bit. :)

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