I have zero respect for someone who would take a role like that.
"Antitrust" is a bogus concept.
It is never and was never in the public interest.
It is also a massive violation of the rights of companies and their shareholders.
Consider that if Windows/IE were really that bad, people would have just switched more readily to a Microsoft competitor. Desktop-quality Linux would have come about/come about sooner, or something equivalent.
This is an example of the point that there is no such thing as a monopoly unless it's created through legal channels (i.e. is granted by the government).
There is no business that can't be competed against with sufficient capital.
And the global economy accumulates spare capital over time (because in the net, the species produces more than it consumes).
Even "natural monopolies" are a function of a mistaken way to implement property rights, as opposed to being "natural." Because you can always build underneath or around whatever is already there.
edit: This is a serious intellectual comment that deserves to be read. It also matters a lot for our industry. Consider Google in Europe right now.
Consider last-mile telephone lines. It's wasteful to have ten companies each spend billions of dollars digging up the same roads to lay the same cables - and it's a nearly-impossible barrier to entry for new competitors. Sure, anything is possible with "sufficient capital", but fundamentally it's an inefficient waste of time and investor money to recreate a service that already exists, and the investors will be correspondingly scarce.
Most countries have enacted legislation enforcing fairly shared use of such lines (breaking up monopolies in the process) because cooperation is fundamentally more efficient than competition as effort is not wasted in duplication.
As a result, the ISP/telco market in civilized countries has since escaped from that stagnant local maxima with its high barrier-of-entry, to a more agile, more competitive state where smaller players have a fair chance of competing. I'm not sure if this includes the USA though (c.f. Comcast/TWC merger complaints, single-ISP areas, the "Worst company in america" award, unending complaints on /r/technology &c).
Believe me, people would do that if they were getting sufficiently screwed by telcos and if it were legal.
Actually, the former condition is already satisfied, but the latter is (basically) not.
Though there have been lots of municipal broadband efforts, which is a point in my favor, here. The telcos fight them tooth and nail using the legal system.
That is just another example of a legal monopoly (as opposed to a natural monopoly---no such thing).
Why not extend such egality to all citizens? And why do people have to get "screwed by telcos" first before it can happen?
Arbitrary government exercise of power is incredibly dangerous.
http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/
"[...] Be was engaged in enthusiastic discussions with Dell, Compaq, Micron, and Hitachi. Taken together, pre-installation arrangements with vendors of this magnitude could have had a major impact on the future of Be and BeOS. But of the four, only Hitachi actually shipped a machine with BeOS pre-installed. The rest apparently backed off after a closer reading of the fine print in their Microsoft Windows License agreements. Hitachi did ship a line of machines (the Flora Prius) with BeOS pre-installed, but made changes to the bootloader -- rendering BeOS invisible to the consumer -- before shipping. Apparently, Hitachi received a little visit from Microsoft just before shipping the Flora Prius, and were reminded of the terms of the license."
There are no specific examples that will get you out of this.
Actually, it Windows already kinda does suck, which is why so many people (even companies) use Apple. And there are lots of other alternative OSs.
So you're saying that no amount of evidence to the contrary will change your mind?
I mean, you can keep taking it out one level, and competition can happen there. For instance: Can't compete due to OEM agreements with MS? Have to get an OEM to capitulate, or start your own OEM, or find another way to get your competing OS on machines. There is no specific example that will make the argument that competition is impossible go through.
Why didn't you try to understand what I said instead of taking the cheapest opportunity to pick on it?
That is what Apple does, for instance.
You can't dismiss evidence ahead of time because you're convinced your theory is true.
this isn't a cheap opportunity to pick at your argument, it's a huge red flag that you have a fundamental error in your reasoning.
>I mean, you can keep taking it out one level, and competition can happen there. For instance: Can't compete due to OEM agreements with MS? Have to get an OEM to capitulate, or start your own OEM, or find another way to get your competing OS on machines. There is no specific example that will make the argument that competition is impossible go through.
Fine - but this argument doesn't model reality, and this is where the relevance of evidence comes in: many times competition is theoretically possible but won't occur since no one wants to risk a lot of capital and time and effort on what will likely be an unsuccessful venture.
So if an unregulated Microsoft manages to lean on their competitors enough that people don't want to try competing anymore, then competition is still possible, but without regulation it won't occur.
There is no possible counter-evidence. You'd say the same thing about lots of things---for example, that the Earth is spherical.
So you are mistaken here about how epistemology works.
> many times competition is theoretically possible but won't occur since no one wants to risk a lot of capital and time and effort on what will likely be an unsuccessful venture.
That isn't borne out in reality. It's very easy to compete against a shitty product with a superior product, and there is plenty of capital to compete with any product that exists today.
> So if an unregulated Microsoft manages to lean on their competitors enough that people don't want to try competing anymore
What does it mean to "lean on competitors"? Nothing. It's meaningless. There is literally nothing a company can do to "lean on" competitors unless they use the law to do it. They can lean on other market participants---e.g., OEMs, But you can always get around that because you can start a competing OEM or get an OEM to capitulate. That's why I say I can always take the argument out one level.
I'm most likely not going to continue responding. I will if you ask a question out of curiosity, but I'm not interested in "aruging" with you further.
The only strength that is strong enough to strangle competitors at birth is the long arm of the law.
In other words, the only way to keep out competition is to use force.
That is precisely what is disallowed in a free market, i.e., in a rights-respection nation.
Those are, in effect, government created. I am totally against that. I am totally against government passing laws to favor certain people over others, treating people unequally.
The main thing you can do with 99% market share is lose it.
edit: Actually, to elaborate...
A better way to put it: I go from the ground up, not the top down.
Most ideologies go top-down, which is utterly futile and is why people believe there is a dichotomy between the moral and the practical, i.e., principles and pragmatism.
Going top-down produces ideologies that are floating abstractions. Castles in the air. They end up being more constricting then they are empowering. Nearly every ideology you have ever heard of is like this. That is why you reject ideology.
If you do it from the ground up, you get an entirely different result.
If you want further reading, here [1] are some short excerpts about antitrust laws from one of my favorite authors.
The biggest drawback that I saw from the DOJ decision was that Microsoft was not allowed to innovate. Windows 98 and Active Desktop can be considered an early precursor to today's web applications like Chrome packaged apps and Firefox apps. How might the application landscape look today if XP were firmly rooted in the concept of web applications rather than native applications? The decision against Microsoft actually slowed them down and allowed them to slowly outlast their competitors.
Instead of fighting a browser war, Netscape might have pivoted and created a Chrome OS like operating system that ran on top of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. Google might have become known for creating a rich set of web-centric APIs that Netscape OS leveraged.
Instead, Netscape got stuck in an entrenched losing battle over a product. It was myopia that defeated them. The DOJ decision delayed the inevitable and it caused Netscape to waste resources thinking they had a chance in a "fair" fight. The Web 2.0 revolution was poised to take place on the desktop rather than in the browser. As a result, I think we all have suffered a 15 year setback.
I feel in the same way that an EU decision against Google won't correct any injustices, but it might stifle innovation; and not just innovation from Google, but its competitors as well.