His complaint wasn't that Microsoft (or himself) didn't make money, it's that Microsoft became complacent and lost the will to innovate.

Microsoft made plenty of money between 1998 and 2014. They also basically ceased innovating. I was a child and teenager during Microsoft's glory days from 1985-2000. They were basically unstoppable: if you thought you had a good software-related idea, Microsoft was already doing it, doing it better, and bringing some nasty market-power tricks to bear (much like Google in their glory days from ~2000-2015). I started my career soon after the DoJ consent decree, and Microsoft became a joke. They were the 800 lb. gorilla that sat in the corner milking their Windows/IE/Office monopolies (and eventually losing them) while the web became a bigger platform than Windows ever was.

> milking their Windows/IE/Office monopolies (and eventually losing them)

Losing them? Nearly all the business workspace I know is Windows-only. Maybe not in Silicon Valley or top tech schools, but Windows is the norm for most businesses. It's not a competitive marketplace.

This may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that a powerful executive clearly could have a bias when criticizing legal/regulatory action.

Quite often, I see wealthy, influential members of the tech community speak out against regulatory function citing things like lost innovation, when the reality is that they were pretty financially motivated to disparage government action in the first place. Again, that’s not to say that this executive was lying, but he clearly makes negative statements around the antitrust case and had a clear financial reason for doing so. He’s not a neutral party making an objective observation here.

Is your argument that the consent decree preventing Microsoft from innovating wrt to the web, or that they were afraid to because of the recent anti-trust action? The former I have a hard time believing (though I probably haven't read enough history on it to make an informed decision), but the latter seems very plausible.

More the latter. Same thing happened with IBM: they were willing to let Microsoft retain the rights to MS-DOS because they were under antitrust scrutiny throughout all of the 70s.

Wow! Can you see what you’re arguing for here? A tech company under tight scrutiny has to give an opportunity for a smaller competitor to unlock incredible wealth beyond what the big tech firm could have done on its own.

/r/selfawarewolves

I'm not arguing for anything here. I'm explaining that the original commenter has it right: the result of this will be less innovation within a company under intense antitrust scrutiny (whether it be IBM, Microsoft, Google, or any other). Whether innovation happens elsewhere is a separate question. Personally I think it's pretty likely - it worked out for Microsoft and Google, after all - and probably would be a good thing over the long term, but there was also an "innovation desert" for ~4-5 years while the big incumbents were too scared to innovate or compete and yet the new startups were not big or wealthy enough to field an effective challenge.

Steve Ballmer was President from 1998-2001 and CEO from 2000-2014. Maybe that was more relevant than the consent decree?

He (Ballmer rather than Gates) was in that position largely BECAUSE of the consent decree. I think Ballmer gets a bad rap- for all the complaints about relevance Microsoft grew its business from $23B in 2000 to $86B in 2014 and greatly increased its presence across a bunch of enterprise segments.

I think you and the executive may agree. It did have an impact, because the moribund culture at Microsoft hurt the stock for about a dozen years after the anti-trust. All the growth has been recent, and has required a massive strategic and organizational refocusing of Microsoft away from Windows to cloud, where Microsoft does not have to worry about anti-trust.

That is not to say it is not worth sending Google through a similar period of moribundity until they find new leadership and markets to pursue.