... the list goes on but show me a similar list from Google.
How did this happen? Was Bill Gates president and make that the law? There's no way you could use WordPerfect? That was illegal? Oh, WordPerfect start sucking in the 90s didn't it, so you stopped using it like I did? But that didn't have anything to do with it, did it?
Try transfering your ad campaign from Google to Bing? It is incredibly poor fidelity. Support for the .doc format in 1997 was better than the support you get porting your ad campaign.
I'd like to have other search providers use my gmail email data. How do I do that? Oh, it's not supported? I thought it was my email? As an advertiser can I decent placement support or clickfraud data? No. OK, I'll just go to another search ad provider -- oh wait, you're the only game in town. I'll play by your rules.
2) This is totally not a one sided problem. You think Microsoft is emailing Google to work with them on the issues? Ha.
3) You can POP/IMAP into your Gmail and download all of your email.
4) You squashed this into the same paragraph as the email thing, but yeah, that sucks. I agree. Alternatively you can use them until you are big enough and then hire someone to get ads directly from people but that doesn't help the small guy. I don't know what a noble solution is to this is - maybe everyone should agree on a format for moving ad campaigns around?
But hell, even Chrome asks on first run what search provider you want to use in a SANE way that encourages people to pick, unlike the IE of today that makes you jump through 15 screens just to get to pick a search provider.
I'd hardly say they are being monopolistic (which is the actual illegal part of being a monopoly).
When I can't even get a simple table from Office to WordPerfect to work properly what's the point (nothing fancy), where not talking excel formulas. If the document specs had been made available, you bet WordPerfect would have that implemented in no time. Word did have good support for WordPerfect files thus it was a one way street.
Wat? This is the whole principle of an ad exchange.
He used product tying and manipulated vendors into anti-competitive agreements such that they would either use what Microsoft wanted them to use exclusively or they wouldn't be able to offer it at all.
As for how they got the initial traction, they managed to get bundled with the IBM PC. IBM back in the day used exactly the same sort of tactics ("Nobody ever got fired for using IBM" & they invented FUD), though they've reformed quite a bit since then.
WordPerfect, Borland's compilers, etc. were widely considered the best back in the day, so I don't think it was primarily the strength of Microsoft's products which made people use them.
My recollection of this is a fair bit different. WP seriously began to lag Word in the 90s. While WP wss the undisputed king in MSDOS, on Windows it was buggy and late. Office 95 in particular was pretty crushing.
Borland was somewhat similar. They had a good set of dev tools, and for example, their C++ compiler was blindingly fast and the VCL was relatively clean (at least compared to MFC). But around VC 4.0 that began to change (at least build speed). VC started to beat Borland in build time and seemed to spread its lead in code quality. This coupled with a better IDE made is Visual C++ become the more common choice. Although I also think the strength of VB played a large role in the uptake in VC. No data to back it up, but anecdotcally I saw a lot of ISV shops bring VC along, because they were building a lot of internal tools with VB (and no one really had anything to compete with VB).
And lets be clear... VC was never shipped as part of Windows nor any bundling of VC with OEMs. So there's no monopoly ties that help push your case that VC became dominant through some monopoly manipulation.
There are emails that say that that was due to being deliberately hampered on Bill Gate's orders, unless I'm confusing them for one of the other companies he did that sort of thing to. I think someone else linked to that already.
> And lets be clear... VC was never shipped as part of Windows nor any bundling of VC with OEMs. So there's no monopoly ties that help push your case that VC became dominant through some monopoly manipulation.
They also had access to Windows internals and such, but I will grant that they made a good product too.
But people wanted the full fidelity of the MS file formats on different systems. Like I want the full power of GMail with a different ad provider.
Getting the data out is easy. You could do that with any version of Word/Excel. In fact, you could have built automation tools to do this, drop it into an ETL, and have it anywhere you like.
The data is rarely the full issue. It's the fidelity of service that people want.
Good luck with your formulas in CSV...
> Getting the data out is easy. You could do that with any version of Word/Excel.
Ken... I have had problems with different releases of Office (PC and Mac) importing Office documents... It was never easy. It wasn't even very predictable.
2) mostly it wasn't forcing you, just making it very hard for you to leave their ecosystem. exporting your email out of outlook for example was intentionally made difficult.
So you were required to use Windows? I used an Amiga until it was on its deathbed, so I find it hard to believe that you had to use Windows.
But in any case, the issue with Google is that we're the product and the advertisers are the customer. Google's ad product probably is worse than any comparable MS product I can recall -- at least from the perspective of the customer.
And lets be clear, MS never built something you had to use, any more than you have to use Google's ad product. You use them both because they are dominant in their industry. But for both, there was a time when they weren't the most dominant. People made a choice to use their products.
The thing that almost makes Microsoft a more sympathetic monopoly is that their monopoly was to the customers that used the product. So if you want to end their monopoloy in Windows, stop using the product and use something else. If enough people do that, the monopoly ceases.
Google's monopoly is indirect. As an advertiser, even if I move to another ad platform -- if my product doesn't move (the people searching with Google search), I'm still screwed. An uprising by the customer can't change the monopoly -- they need to get to the product.
(Note, there are technically different names for these two different forms of industry domination, but its not uncommon to refer to them under the same name -- anti-competitive behaviors can apply to either).