This week Microsoft became the third company to be worth over a trillion US dollars. I don't think it's in decline.
At the time of this writing, at a $996.5B market cap, Microsoft is the biggest publicly traded company in the world.
Yes but it did go into decline for a while until it reinvented itself. It's lost its dominance in OSs and web browsers. Government intervention didn't cause that, free markets did.
My point is that the article speaks of Microsoft in the past tense and focuses on breaking up "today's big tech" companies. Meanwhile Microsoft is bigger than all of them right now.
Re:We can break up Big Tech
by Hydraulix989 on Sunday April 28, 2019 @01:49PM
(#19772513)
She also mistakenly claims that Google wouldn’t have emerged in the face of a Microsoft monopoly.
MS is extremely successful and if anything is soaring not declining.
I was very surprised reading because I thought it sounded _somewhat_ reasonable when she was describing the problem. However her solution is very drastic. I don think we have any precedent for knowing how the market would respond to such heavy handed regulation. I would have to agree she is out of touch there.
> I don think we have any precedent for knowing how the market would respond to such heavy handed regulation.
Of course we do. See Northern Securities v. United States, Standard Oil v. United States, and the many other landmark antitrust cases. Let's not pretend this hasn't been an issue before.
I agree there is a problem. And there would be precedent for breaking up a company. But she is going further than that. How about the definition of platform utilities for companies with annual global revenue of over $25 billion (see article for full details). There is more too, I won´t repeat the points of the article. I am pretty liberal but I think this kind of regulation is risky.
Did we have large international competition in those days?
What sort of international competition might be the result of busting up Google? I really don’t want to go back to the bad old days of Motorola, Nokia, and Ericsson making phone OSes.
Would Alibaba be a better marketplace than Amazon if Amazon had separate companies, like if Amazon Essentials and AWS and Marketplace were distinct companies?
I guarantee that if we wait 10 years the landscape for these big tech companies will be very different.