>One potential reason why Google, Facebook, and Amazon have been singled out for criticism of practices that seem common in the tech industry (and are often pro-consumer) may be due to the prevailing business model in the journalism industry. Google and Facebook are by far the largest competitors in the digital advertising market, and Amazon is expected to be the third-largest player by next year, according to eMarketer. As Ramsi Woodcock pointed out, news publications are also competing for advertising dollars, the type of conflict of interest that usually would warrant disclosure if, say, a journalist held stock in a company they were covering.
I see this argument echoed a lot and I doubt it's as overt as this. Maybe journalists inadvertently have some bias towards social media platforms because they see it hurting their industry or leading to a fight over clicks rather than quality content (which I do believe most journalists would prefer to create rather than clickbait). I find it harder to believe that journalists have banded together to fight all of the platforms that are potential competitors to them; an individual journalist probably just doesn't have that incentive and a news org probably couldn't keep a coordinated activity like trying to fight social media companies secret (I mean, trying to keep a secret cabal among journalists must be pretty tough)
Agreed. The much more blindingly obvious reason to me seems to be that Google, Facebook and Amazon are just really huge companies. Why would you write articles about something smaller?
Are you implying that Microsoft is smaller than Google, Facebook or Amazon? Using market capitalization as a measure, Microsoft is currently the larger company.
>I mean, trying to keep a secret cabal among journalists must be pretty tough
It does not have to be a 'secret cabal', just a group of like-minded individuals soft-coordinating their responses. JournoList [0] has existed for three years before being made public. When exposure forced JournoList to close, the response from the members was immediately to create another group like it [1]. What also telling is that the members don't think of themselves being a part of 'secret cabal', which allows for the double-think of coordinating responses while being sincerely sure they do no such thing [ibid.].
JournoList is not just an isolated example. There was at least GameJournoPros (no good source link unfortunately), explicitly modeled after JournoList and it's safe to assume that many more exist.
All that tech people see is Microsoft positioning itself as this open and FOSS friendly company. But this is just a tiny fraction of what they do and mostly fuelled by a tiny fraction of their employees.
The corporate facing rest hasn't changed a bit. Quite the contrary. Their licensing has become even more opaque, their overreach regarding what they shove down user's throats has increased, and you can't be sure you're the costumer anymore. But all of this stays hidden within some IT department who are mostly staffed by Windows admins who wouldn't know better anyway and don't complain. The developers who rave about the cool new Microsoft never have to deal with the blunt impact.
It's quite a bizarre thing. With one hand they embrace FOSS, stick a Linux kernel in Windows, etc and with the other they force updates that erase user files and break drivers.
My gut reaction is, we already tried that and it didn't work the first time so it probably won't work if we try it again. Though MS is a different company than it was back then. Back then I would've been ecstatic to see MS be broken up and greatly humbled because of all their destructive abuses. But now... meh.
I think the general impression is the opposite: people talked about breaking up Microsoft, they lost an anti-trust suit for overplaying their Windows hand to try to corner the internet, and ever since they've been using their OS to gain a foothold in new markets as opposed to cornering them, and being happy with being the boring second or fifth placed option. So what was done worked well enough. Sure, MS has acquired large minority shares of lots of markets, but they're not exactly setting the agenda the way Google does with Android, Amazon does with logistics or Facebook says it wants to with currency and it also isn't a de facto moderator of any significant arenas for political debate, so nobody's interested in that angle either.
Agree on the whole meh thing. I don't think journalists care about Google hurting their publisher's ads, but I do think they care about not pitching a thinkpiece from 1995...
I think there is a strong and concerted attack on our best companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. This is being financed by truly evil actors. Please notice that no one talks about the dictatorships rising around the world in Russia, China, Venezuela, and elsewhere. Notice that no one is really taking on the big oil and coal companies that have caused climate change.
Instead people are targeting young companies that are making the world better for minor infractions.
Isn't it obvious? Microsoft's former monopoly was eroded first by the web, then phones, then tablets. Using a non-Microsoft computing platform is nowhere near as restricting as it was in the 90s.
And they never got the same foothold in newer markets they entered since then.
Including macOS, iOS, android, chromeos, linux? (Laugh at the last one if you must, but it is more viable today than it was in the 1990s chiefly because platform agnostic web based content is more normal in niches formerly occupied by Win32.)
> linux? (Laugh at the last one if you must, but it is more viable today than it was in the 1990s chiefly because platform agnostic web based content is more normal in niches formerly occupied by Win32.)
and is also used on the majority of non-personal computers in the world. That's not some small number and a very large market share.
Maybe some people in the science and HPC community, but I find a lot of developers and people at meetups surrounding Linux technologies are often using Macs. Red Hat notoriously employees a lot of people that don't even use Linux. I personally use Arch Linux. You can't really compare something that is open source though and very modular, to something like Windows though.
It would have been hard to predict that in the 1990s though. I certainly did not.
Also we cannot measure to what extent the DOJ probe and its aftereffects distracted Microsoft from further dominance and led it to not compete as well. So maybe in some form the regulation did it in after all.
Not quite sure I agree with your order. They were caught flatfooted - famously so - on smart phones and tablets.
Firefox 2 and the iPhone came out about the same time. I think the one-two punch (and you can argue which is 1 and which is 2, but I'm not interested) was that on one side you had a device, populated by people with considerable disposable income, that couldn't run IE if you tried. That got the attention of management in ways us developers never could.
And on the other, you had a safe harbor for people who were up for a switch elsewhere. And it helped substantially that debugging was better on that alternative (developers would use Mozilla and Firefox for development whether management wanted FF support or not).
I think one-two punch is a good way to put it, and that they complemented each other, and continue to do so in the present. It used to be viable to have Windows-only web content or something only accessible on a Win32 application. iOS and android helped us get away from that reality.
Of course you could look at the App Store and Play and say that potential for new entrants is now blocked somewhere else...
>1. The monopoly in desktops is old and considered waning.
Yet their desktop monopoly is as strong as it ever was. I think people just lost interest in the desktop.
Still I don't think there's a point to breaking up Microsoft, there's not much to gain. They aren't really misusing their desktop monopoly. People can actually picks alternatives, if they really wanted, both for the desktop, and the applications they run. We're no longer locked into paying Microsoft, most just choose to do so regardless of their options.
3) Nobody cares about LinkedIn as a channel for free
expression, nor is it a breeding ground for dangerous ideologies
4) Microsoft is generally much more enterprise-focused than these other companies, which all have very active footholds in the lives of regular people. When it comes to something like the power to make or break democracy, Microsoft really has very little impact by comparison.
It's not that Microsoft being so big is good, but it just doesn't have an impact on the masses that's comparable to the others.
Antitrust law isn't a tool to secure democracy but to secure competition. I don't think the worry is about actions taken by Microsoft hurting democracy; the concern is MS systems being insecure owing to a lack of competitive pressure and, as a consequence, being vulnerable to democracy-disrupting attacks.
You can run a few Linux distros as a reasonable desktop OS, with corporate support and all, if you want.
You can run Apple machines and software for desktop computing, as many companies do.
On servers, Windows is a minority.
MS Office is, of course, a one of a kind thing. Still it's interoperable with other software, within reason, and just reaps the benefits of the network effect, much as other specialized "industry standard" software.
That's fair; I guess the current discourse has muddled antitrust and the other problems with big tech together in my mind, at least in terms of steps being called for and/or taken.
> 1) Nobody takes the Microsoft Store seriously
> 2) People barely take Bing seriously
The problem with using these as factors in dismissing a monopoly (or the converse) is that it's simply declaring that being really good at a thing by definition makes you a monopoly.
I assume by "take seriously" the poster meant that their marketshare was pretty insignificant along all axes. The Apple App Store has a 100% market share of the iPhone app market and by proxy has control of all apps on 90% of the entire revenue in the smartphone space. Microsoft Store has ... nothing.
Bing has 33% market share in the US an 9% globally. That's not a monopoly.
A monopoly has to control an overwhelming amount of a given market, not just be big.
I'd not be opposed to open access rules for developers. With that said, there are 3 major consoles on the market, and then if you include phones and PCs, it's by no means a monopolized market.
So you think that Nintendo - who markets itself as being kid friendly - should be forced to accept any game?
Would you be okay if Nintendo was forced to allow the worse aspects of the mobile gaming market - advertising supported games, loot boxes, in app purchases “pay to win”, etc.? Should they be forced to allow Grand Theft Auto on their platform where you can literally beat people up with a dildo?
The mobile market is not “monopolized” either. You can choose to either publish games on iOS, Android with Google Play or Android without Google Play.
Again, no, because the console market is competitive so intervention is unnecessary.
Potentially separately, I'd not object to requiring the ability for console makers to allow side-loaded apps people themselves make. I'm not suggesting forcing them to distribute anything via their own App Stores. You can side load onto Android phones and it's not an issue. You can download and run literally anything you want onto your PC or macOS devices, and it's not an issue. You can even side-load anything you want onto your iPhones via Xcode if you have the source and again, not an issue.
The last time antitrust action was taken against Microsoft (United States v. Microsoft Corp., filed in 2001), law folks' tech-illiteracy and Microsoft's slitheriness led to a penalty of merely having to publish API documentation. The aim had been to make Windows an interface that competitors could implement.
I hope Microsoft gets served for antitrust again, and that this time a savvier legal community can actually achieve the goal is the first suit.
I'd posit that the primary reason it's not as "easy" to virtualize macOS is because Virtualbox, VMWare, et al haven't poured enormous sums of money into optimizing for macOS performance, as they have Windows.
There are 1.5 billion active Windows PCs, including laptops in the world. [1]
There are also 1.5 billion active Apple devices including Macs and tablets, and 2.5 billion active Google Android devices.
Given Linux and other computing devices to add to the above. Microsoft really has an only (at best!) a 25% share of the world of computing devices.
One can split hairs about being the monopoly leader in their niche, but the thing is... PCs and Macs aren’t the main form of computing anymore.
It would be hard to argue that Microsoft should be broken up because Windows is the future of the market and is illegally being exploited to sell more Azure, or Xboxes, or Microsoft Office, etc.
Microsoft has one of the best software security teams in the world, one that arguably created the template that Google and Apple used to create the other best security teams in the industry. The idea that a Microsoft breakup would have improved computer security is an extraordinary claim.
We can reasonably disagree about the quality of their security. More generally though tech diversity makes a difference in security: Dan Geer did an excellent talk about this.
What Dan Geer & co wrote about software monocultures is pretty much the last thing anyone seriously wrote about the topic, which hasn't had much predictive power in the ensuing years. The major bastions of software security on the Internet today --- Apple's iOS hardware/software platform, and Google's Chromium --- are both monocultures, and selecting yourself out of either of them will materially reduce your security (this is not a point HN commenters tend to enjoy reading, but it is nonetheless true).
Geer & co wrote their paper right after the first "Summer of Worms", in which the insecurity of Microsoft's software was such a hot topic that there were congressional hearings on it. His analysis presumed that Microsoft wouldn't commit itself, organization-wide, to correcting the problem, because no other large organization had.
But that's exactly what Microsoft did. On an edict from Bill Gates, the whole company pivoted towards security. They hired a huge number of software security people and contracted out essentially the entire software security consulting industry to assess everything from the TCP/IP drivers to Minesweeper (they now host an internal conference, "Blue Hat", to socialize the results of 3rd party audits from blue-badge vendors and internal researchers). They delayed and re-roadmapped whole projects around security, Longhorn being probably the most obvious example. They trained all their software teams on software security, and enacted company-wide controls on "safe" and "unsafe" library functions.
Essentially, Bill Gates did the same thing in reaction to the Blaster worm that Theo de Raadt did with his fork of NetBSD: a site-wide top-to-bottom audit (I was, somewhat peripherally, involved with the OpenBSD audit of the 1990s; I had some findings and wrote the advisories but was very far from the most productive person in the project). But unlike Theo, Gates had a cubic fuckload of money to throw at the project, and it showed.
The results, I think, more or less refute Geer's argument. Microsoft was able to (significantly, albeit incompletely) address its security gap because it had the resources to do so. Moreover, each major component of Microsoft's software security risk was, individually, huge: a desktop operating system, an office suite, a browser, etc. All required vast resources, and many were able to effectively share resources between each other. Diverse, (necessarily) smaller organizations could not have pulled this off, and, had they existed in 2004 when Geer wrote about them, they'd have started with approximately the same tech debt Microsoft had.
And so today, if you're looking at a desktop operating system and choosing between one secured by the former monocultural bohemoth and another run by a dedicated and passionate band of volunteers, you will in fact usually be better off with the former. If instead of desktop operating systems we look at mobile platforms, the difference is even more stark, to the point where if you're not using either Apple, or Google's flagship supported platform, you're almost surely running something with grave vulnerabilities.
What an informed reply! Thank you for pointing out the influence of mobilized, coordinated resources on security. I will have to factor this perspective into my own and reconsider.
So what do we do if we want to oppose monocultures on principle? Clearly we can't just bury our heads in the sand and deny the truth you've presented here. Maybe the key is to make it easier to develop secure software, so one doesn't need a security team the size of Microsoft's, Apple's, or Google's. So I'm glad Mozilla is introducing more and more Rust into Firefox.
This is what you'd believe if all you'd known about the Microsoft antitrust case was what Wikipedia records about it it in the short "Settlement" section of the Microsoft Antitrust Case article.
In reality, the case broke Microsoft's monopoly on pretty much everything but desktop operating systems (the market broke that later on) and a chastened Microsoft was unable to apply its 1990s tactics to the emerging mobile market, in which it was soundly trounced.
The antitrust objectives of the government were essentially accomplished. Microsoft remains a fearsome competitor in the moribund personal computer market, and essentially nowhere else. Its browser, the focus of the case, is an an also-ran fork of Chromium. It has more or less entirely lost the server market, outside of line-of-business applications in the Fortune 500 that it would have retained regardless of its monopoly status. It's been sidelined almost entirely from mobile computing. Microsoft doesn't even control office software anymore!
Linux nerds dearly wanted to see Microsoft split up, because that's a theatrical and cathartic ending to a case many of them had (weirdly) personalized. But it's clear now that splitting up Microsoft wouldn't have served any public policy objective, and Jackson was wrong to order it split up.
What Wikipedia records about it is precisely all I knew about it. Thank you for the exposition and commentary.
I don't think Linux nerds' taking the case personally is weird, though: antagonism towards Microsoft specifically is a cultural self definition for many of them. As with any court case that parallels a cultural narrative, it was felt personally.
OK, "weird" is the wrong word. You're right, I do understand where it's coming from.
A thing I'd add is that the Microsoft case didn't just chasten Microsoft, but also the industry as a whole. In at least a couple of FAANG cases, I know firsthand that antitrust concerns altered product decisions (sometimes for the worse!). I don't think the case was, in the industry, widely considered a win for Microsoft.
> In reality, the case broke Microsoft's monopoly on pretty much everything but desktop operating systems (the market broke that later on) and a chastened Microsoft was unable to apply its 1990s tactics to the emerging mobile market, in which it was soundly trounced.
And search. This piece makes the argument that fear of further antitrust trouble inside Microsoft is why they didn't crush Google in the beginning (search for the phrase "If you are younger than 29" to get to the paragraph): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...
I initially thought you were wrong, but you are not.
“Monopolization” [0], which a Wikipedia section on “Sherman Act of 1890” [1] lead me to, is maintaining a monopoly “through conduct deemed unlawfully exclusionary. The mere fact that conduct disadvantages rivals does not... constitute... exclusionary conduct.”
I am most surprised that the Sherman Act explicitly targets monopolization, not monopolies.
Because PCs and Office productivity software are a niche, and it’s hard to argue their market leadership in a niche is being illegally exploited to take over other markets.
What markets? Well, the only one that matters right now is cloud, as it’s gradually eating the entire enterprise software and hardware industry, with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake.
Put another way, Microsoft certainly bought their #2 position in cloud with Azure by being early to market relative to Google, but also by having a huge sales field with Microsoft Windows/Office licensing true-ups to use as discount incentive to buy Azure credits.
Is this illegal? It would be a difficult argument to say so. Given Google’s position with search and Android, Amazon’s market position in cloud, Microsoft is a middle pack player everywhere now. Huge, but middle of the pack.
The only argument that holds some water (per this article) is that Microsoft is big, and big is bad for consumers, therefore, they shouldn’t be big. But it’s vague and really would depend on the judge hearing the case. Amazon has the same argument against it as with Microsoft, but it would be hard to prove they’re harming consumers.
Windows use has very little ability to drive Azure adoption beyond pure financial sales games - you give me a few percentage points more off Windows and Office and I’ll buy some of your Azure. That’s common in any sort of industry transition. Oracle is doing the same thing just very late, with a questionable service and with less success. IBM too.
What’s interesting is most posters in this thread are still fighting 20 year old battles. PCs are maybe 27-28% of the market of computing devices these days. The battle has moved on to cloud services (Amazon being the far away leader) and mobile devices (mostly setted there too, by Google, though Apple’s iOS business alone is larger than all of Microsoft).
Yes, it would still be a niche. Microsoft is successful because they are actually rather diversified. They have several niche cash cows that, combined, make for a very valuable company. Google struggles with this because they’re so dependent on search revenue.
It’s not illegal to be big. This article is largely wishful thinking on whether it should be.
> Or perhaps Microsoft has successfully avoided receiving the same level of antitrust scrutiny as the Big Four because it is neither primarily consumer-facing like Apple or Amazon nor does it operate a platform with a significant amount of political speech via user-generated content (UGC) like Facebook or Google (YouTube).
I can see it being that. MS is not as much in the business of manufacturing consent, using Chomsky and Herman's famous book title. But, all those other companies do it to some extent, though, maybe Apple less so. The journalists from traditional media see these companies eating their lunch, so to speak, and they've been taking jabs at them periodically.
Regular consumers, perhaps mostly the conservative ones, also think they are being manipulated so it resonates with them. So in a way the tech companies managed to make enemies on both sides of the aisle. However, I imagine they'll be fine. I don't see any of them actually getting broken up, especially when they've been spending close to $20M/year in lobbying https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000067823.
A related question, should Microsoft voluntary split or at least spinoff some parts of the company that are no longer complimentary to each other? They seem to be charging towards being mostly a cloud services company. Some of their assets might be more valuable on their own or in the hands of another company.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadI see this argument echoed a lot and I doubt it's as overt as this. Maybe journalists inadvertently have some bias towards social media platforms because they see it hurting their industry or leading to a fight over clicks rather than quality content (which I do believe most journalists would prefer to create rather than clickbait). I find it harder to believe that journalists have banded together to fight all of the platforms that are potential competitors to them; an individual journalist probably just doesn't have that incentive and a news org probably couldn't keep a coordinated activity like trying to fight social media companies secret (I mean, trying to keep a secret cabal among journalists must be pretty tough)
It does not have to be a 'secret cabal', just a group of like-minded individuals soft-coordinating their responses. JournoList [0] has existed for three years before being made public. When exposure forced JournoList to close, the response from the members was immediately to create another group like it [1]. What also telling is that the members don't think of themselves being a part of 'secret cabal', which allows for the double-think of coordinating responses while being sincerely sure they do no such thing [ibid.].
JournoList is not just an isolated example. There was at least GameJournoPros (no good source link unfortunately), explicitly modeled after JournoList and it's safe to assume that many more exist.
[0] :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList
[1] :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList#Cabalist_spin-off
All that tech people see is Microsoft positioning itself as this open and FOSS friendly company. But this is just a tiny fraction of what they do and mostly fuelled by a tiny fraction of their employees.
The corporate facing rest hasn't changed a bit. Quite the contrary. Their licensing has become even more opaque, their overreach regarding what they shove down user's throats has increased, and you can't be sure you're the costumer anymore. But all of this stays hidden within some IT department who are mostly staffed by Windows admins who wouldn't know better anyway and don't complain. The developers who rave about the cool new Microsoft never have to deal with the blunt impact.
Agree on the whole meh thing. I don't think journalists care about Google hurting their publisher's ads, but I do think they care about not pitching a thinkpiece from 1995...
Instead people are targeting young companies that are making the world better for minor infractions.
And they never got the same foothold in newer markets they entered since then.
and is also used on the majority of non-personal computers in the world. That's not some small number and a very large market share.
Science? HPC? Hardware? Web? DIY? These "niches" (which are actually huge) are dominated by Linux.
You'll be actually laughed out of the room if you talked about using Windows here, and mac is not even remotely present.
Yup. To add to that, IoT is also dominated by Linux. which number around 30 Billion connected devices worldwide. That's completely Linux.
So is MS disturbing macOS competition? I guess not much. And don't forget that MS only have strong consumer OS market share, not entire OS.
Also we cannot measure to what extent the DOJ probe and its aftereffects distracted Microsoft from further dominance and led it to not compete as well. So maybe in some form the regulation did it in after all.
Firefox 2 and the iPhone came out about the same time. I think the one-two punch (and you can argue which is 1 and which is 2, but I'm not interested) was that on one side you had a device, populated by people with considerable disposable income, that couldn't run IE if you tried. That got the attention of management in ways us developers never could.
And on the other, you had a safe harbor for people who were up for a switch elsewhere. And it helped substantially that debugging was better on that alternative (developers would use Mozilla and Firefox for development whether management wanted FF support or not).
Of course you could look at the App Store and Play and say that potential for new entrants is now blocked somewhere else...
1. The monopoly in desktops is old and considered waning.
2. It is the only competition for the others in some areas (Azure for AWS, Bing for Google) so we kind of want it around.
3. Also, it charges for services so, perhaps, it doesn't need to advertise. (Pros and cons)
Yet their desktop monopoly is as strong as it ever was. I think people just lost interest in the desktop.
Still I don't think there's a point to breaking up Microsoft, there's not much to gain. They aren't really misusing their desktop monopoly. People can actually picks alternatives, if they really wanted, both for the desktop, and the applications they run. We're no longer locked into paying Microsoft, most just choose to do so regardless of their options.
Still very strong though. In my industry, games, Windows is 96% (70% is windows 10, 20% windows 7)
2) People barely take Bing seriously
3) Nobody cares about LinkedIn as a channel for free expression, nor is it a breeding ground for dangerous ideologies
4) Microsoft is generally much more enterprise-focused than these other companies, which all have very active footholds in the lives of regular people. When it comes to something like the power to make or break democracy, Microsoft really has very little impact by comparison.
It's not that Microsoft being so big is good, but it just doesn't have an impact on the masses that's comparable to the others.
You can run a few Linux distros as a reasonable desktop OS, with corporate support and all, if you want.
You can run Apple machines and software for desktop computing, as many companies do.
On servers, Windows is a minority.
MS Office is, of course, a one of a kind thing. Still it's interoperable with other software, within reason, and just reaps the benefits of the network effect, much as other specialized "industry standard" software.
As a monopoly, MS's position is weak now.
GitHub is of course one of many, gitlab, bitbucket, or self-hosted being common alts.
Same with LinkedIn, it’s just social media like Facebook/Twitter/reddit but emphasizes biz
The problem with using these as factors in dismissing a monopoly (or the converse) is that it's simply declaring that being really good at a thing by definition makes you a monopoly.
Bing has 33% market share in the US an 9% globally. That's not a monopoly.
A monopoly has to control an overwhelming amount of a given market, not just be big.
Would you be okay if Nintendo was forced to allow the worse aspects of the mobile gaming market - advertising supported games, loot boxes, in app purchases “pay to win”, etc.? Should they be forced to allow Grand Theft Auto on their platform where you can literally beat people up with a dildo?
The mobile market is not “monopolized” either. You can choose to either publish games on iOS, Android with Google Play or Android without Google Play.
Potentially separately, I'd not object to requiring the ability for console makers to allow side-loaded apps people themselves make. I'm not suggesting forcing them to distribute anything via their own App Stores. You can side load onto Android phones and it's not an issue. You can download and run literally anything you want onto your PC or macOS devices, and it's not an issue. You can even side-load anything you want onto your iPhones via Xcode if you have the source and again, not an issue.
I hope Microsoft gets served for antitrust again, and that this time a savvier legal community can actually achieve the goal is the first suit.
There are also 1.5 billion active Apple devices including Macs and tablets, and 2.5 billion active Google Android devices.
Given Linux and other computing devices to add to the above. Microsoft really has an only (at best!) a 25% share of the world of computing devices.
One can split hairs about being the monopoly leader in their niche, but the thing is... PCs and Macs aren’t the main form of computing anymore.
It would be hard to argue that Microsoft should be broken up because Windows is the future of the market and is illegally being exploited to sell more Azure, or Xboxes, or Microsoft Office, etc.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/bigger-than-windows-bigger-tha...
Geer & co wrote their paper right after the first "Summer of Worms", in which the insecurity of Microsoft's software was such a hot topic that there were congressional hearings on it. His analysis presumed that Microsoft wouldn't commit itself, organization-wide, to correcting the problem, because no other large organization had.
But that's exactly what Microsoft did. On an edict from Bill Gates, the whole company pivoted towards security. They hired a huge number of software security people and contracted out essentially the entire software security consulting industry to assess everything from the TCP/IP drivers to Minesweeper (they now host an internal conference, "Blue Hat", to socialize the results of 3rd party audits from blue-badge vendors and internal researchers). They delayed and re-roadmapped whole projects around security, Longhorn being probably the most obvious example. They trained all their software teams on software security, and enacted company-wide controls on "safe" and "unsafe" library functions.
Essentially, Bill Gates did the same thing in reaction to the Blaster worm that Theo de Raadt did with his fork of NetBSD: a site-wide top-to-bottom audit (I was, somewhat peripherally, involved with the OpenBSD audit of the 1990s; I had some findings and wrote the advisories but was very far from the most productive person in the project). But unlike Theo, Gates had a cubic fuckload of money to throw at the project, and it showed.
The results, I think, more or less refute Geer's argument. Microsoft was able to (significantly, albeit incompletely) address its security gap because it had the resources to do so. Moreover, each major component of Microsoft's software security risk was, individually, huge: a desktop operating system, an office suite, a browser, etc. All required vast resources, and many were able to effectively share resources between each other. Diverse, (necessarily) smaller organizations could not have pulled this off, and, had they existed in 2004 when Geer wrote about them, they'd have started with approximately the same tech debt Microsoft had.
And so today, if you're looking at a desktop operating system and choosing between one secured by the former monocultural bohemoth and another run by a dedicated and passionate band of volunteers, you will in fact usually be better off with the former. If instead of desktop operating systems we look at mobile platforms, the difference is even more stark, to the point where if you're not using either Apple, or Google's flagship supported platform, you're almost surely running something with grave vulnerabilities.
In reality, the case broke Microsoft's monopoly on pretty much everything but desktop operating systems (the market broke that later on) and a chastened Microsoft was unable to apply its 1990s tactics to the emerging mobile market, in which it was soundly trounced.
The antitrust objectives of the government were essentially accomplished. Microsoft remains a fearsome competitor in the moribund personal computer market, and essentially nowhere else. Its browser, the focus of the case, is an an also-ran fork of Chromium. It has more or less entirely lost the server market, outside of line-of-business applications in the Fortune 500 that it would have retained regardless of its monopoly status. It's been sidelined almost entirely from mobile computing. Microsoft doesn't even control office software anymore!
Linux nerds dearly wanted to see Microsoft split up, because that's a theatrical and cathartic ending to a case many of them had (weirdly) personalized. But it's clear now that splitting up Microsoft wouldn't have served any public policy objective, and Jackson was wrong to order it split up.
I don't think Linux nerds' taking the case personally is weird, though: antagonism towards Microsoft specifically is a cultural self definition for many of them. As with any court case that parallels a cultural narrative, it was felt personally.
A thing I'd add is that the Microsoft case didn't just chasten Microsoft, but also the industry as a whole. In at least a couple of FAANG cases, I know firsthand that antitrust concerns altered product decisions (sometimes for the worse!). I don't think the case was, in the industry, widely considered a win for Microsoft.
And search. This piece makes the argument that fear of further antitrust trouble inside Microsoft is why they didn't crush Google in the beginning (search for the phrase "If you are younger than 29" to get to the paragraph): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...
“Monopolization” [0], which a Wikipedia section on “Sherman Act of 1890” [1] lead me to, is maintaining a monopoly “through conduct deemed unlawfully exclusionary. The mere fact that conduct disadvantages rivals does not... constitute... exclusionary conduct.”
I am most surprised that the Sherman Act explicitly targets monopolization, not monopolies.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolization
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
What markets? Well, the only one that matters right now is cloud, as it’s gradually eating the entire enterprise software and hardware industry, with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake.
Put another way, Microsoft certainly bought their #2 position in cloud with Azure by being early to market relative to Google, but also by having a huge sales field with Microsoft Windows/Office licensing true-ups to use as discount incentive to buy Azure credits.
Is this illegal? It would be a difficult argument to say so. Given Google’s position with search and Android, Amazon’s market position in cloud, Microsoft is a middle pack player everywhere now. Huge, but middle of the pack.
The only argument that holds some water (per this article) is that Microsoft is big, and big is bad for consumers, therefore, they shouldn’t be big. But it’s vague and really would depend on the judge hearing the case. Amazon has the same argument against it as with Microsoft, but it would be hard to prove they’re harming consumers.
Windows use has very little ability to drive Azure adoption beyond pure financial sales games - you give me a few percentage points more off Windows and Office and I’ll buy some of your Azure. That’s common in any sort of industry transition. Oracle is doing the same thing just very late, with a questionable service and with less success. IBM too.
What’s interesting is most posters in this thread are still fighting 20 year old battles. PCs are maybe 27-28% of the market of computing devices these days. The battle has moved on to cloud services (Amazon being the far away leader) and mobile devices (mostly setted there too, by Google, though Apple’s iOS business alone is larger than all of Microsoft).
Not sure what my conclusion is, but Microsoft is an interesting anti-trust case now that I am thinking about it.
It’s not illegal to be big. This article is largely wishful thinking on whether it should be.
I can see it being that. MS is not as much in the business of manufacturing consent, using Chomsky and Herman's famous book title. But, all those other companies do it to some extent, though, maybe Apple less so. The journalists from traditional media see these companies eating their lunch, so to speak, and they've been taking jabs at them periodically.
Regular consumers, perhaps mostly the conservative ones, also think they are being manipulated so it resonates with them. So in a way the tech companies managed to make enemies on both sides of the aisle. However, I imagine they'll be fine. I don't see any of them actually getting broken up, especially when they've been spending close to $20M/year in lobbying https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000067823.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....