Re:It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over ...
by mrkramer on Friday April 17, 2020 @04:08AM
(#22897121)
What Microsoft did with Internet Explorer maybe looked dirty back in the day but ironically enough United States v. Microsoft Corp. suit started in 1998, the same year when Google was founded and quickly after conquered the internet with its search engine and internet browser. Innovations will always displace dominant products and the cycle goes on and on.
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Re:It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over ...
by erpellan on Saturday April 18, 2020 @05:31AM
(#22906447)
That is nowhere close to how ruthlessly they crushed competitors well before that. Microsoft are why you've probably never heard of Supercalc, Lotus/123 and WordPerfect. All superior products in the 80s and 90s, all crushed by MS strong-arm tactics of forcing PC manufacturers to sell machines with Windows and Office pre-installed.
They even destroyed companies they weren't even competing with, but thought they _might_ want to later! All MS needed to do was issue a vague press release that they were working on a competitor to [some successful software product] and all the customers would hold off on purchases until the original (successful) company went bankrupt. Many times MS never ever released anything, leaving everyone worse off.
So yeah. They seem nicer now, but they climbed over a lot of dead companies to get here.
Re:It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over ...
by CPLX on Friday April 17, 2020 @07:32AM
(#22898086)
There’s a strong argument to be made that putting MS on the defensive about antitrust in the late 90’s is the reason so many other dominant tech companies were able to get a foothold in the 5-10 years following.
Which also points to why we are in today’s predicament, having abandoned antitrust entirely.