Re:Elizabeth Warren’s simple case for breaking up big tech
by igravious on Sunday July 21, 2019 @10:31AM
(#20491459)
You make extremely good points. (And I'm not just saying that because you restored my karmic balance.)
I'm sure others (like myself) would be interested in your opinion on present day Microsoft. do you think they have enough competition in the desktop marketplace now? Do you think they warrant regulating as things currently stand? How about the rest of the Gang-of-five (Amazon/Apple/Alphabet/Facebook)?
side note: Maybe newer HNers don't realise but downvoting on HN is _not_ to express disagreement (you do that by replying and expressing your opposing opinion), downvoting here _ought_ to be used to express disapproval of behaviour. I'm correct in this, no?
Yes, I still think that breaking up MS still would have been a good idea. It took three unexpected developments for MS to be as docile as it is now:
- The rise of Linux and F/OSS more generally. There are all sorts of reasons it didn't have to happen.
- The failure to execute competently on mobile (making a scaled-down Windows instead of a mobile-first OS) at the exact same time that Apple, almost out of nowhere, was executing competently, and Google, not previously an OS or hardware company, acquired Android, which depended on Linux and other FOSS being ready and robust for consumer use.
- The failure to execute competently on the internet. They certainly had the positioning (IE, ActiveX, IIS, Hotmail, MSN, etc.), skills, and compute capacity to have won on everything from personal cloud services like email/docs to cloud computing infrastructure.
FOSS was a miracle and the other two mistakes. We can't write laws as if we assume that miracles and mistakes will happen.