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Ask HN: What was the actual impact of Microsoft anti trust case on the industry?

42 points by hardware2win ↗ HN
What projects were affected - stopped existing or the opposite, could grow.

How was the atmosphere at Microsoft at the time? How normal devs were affected?

What implications it had on other companies?

In general, what changed after threat of break up

How big topic that was? Did people outside IT even know about it?

45 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] thread
simonh
As a user the most immediate effect was having to deal with the stupid browser selection screen.

I suspect it did have a cooling effect on some of Microsoft's more egregious business practices for quite a while, but that's a case of making things not happen that otherwise would have, which is impossible to quantify.

coding123
Does anyone even know what changed in Windows? I can't recall a version of windows where IE was not available.

This is from the Wikipedia [1] article:

> Bundling them is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft's victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of IE

I kinda wonder about statute of limitations but I do think that Microsoft should probably sue the United States government at this point because it has since been proven without a doubt that bundling IE did not present an unfair advantage in the browser wars [2] that eventually lead to Chrome easily overtaking all other browsers.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#/media/File:Brows...

toast0
Microsoft should sue for what? They agreed to a settlement with the DOJ that mostly didn't require them to do very much. Then they ignored internet explorer for years and it kind of petered out, even when they tried to get back into it.
resoluteteeth
In what way does your link show that "it has since been proven without a doubt that bundling IE did not present an unfair advantage in the browser wars"?
mgraczyk
It's pretty hard to speculate with any certainty, but I suspect companies like Amazon and Google would have had much more difficulty growing if Microsoft had more power to control their access to Windows users. In the same way that Google and Apple made it difficult to block ads on mobile or sideload apps without using the App/Play stores, MSFT would have found a way to get bigger slices of the Amazon retail and Google search pies.
yuppie_scum
On the other hand, if as a result Facebook never existed (in its long-Zuckerberg form) the world could have been a better place.
mgraczyk
Disagree that FB is a net negative, but it doesn't really matter since FB came over a decade later. I doubt MSFT antitrust would have had any predictable effect on anything that far in the future. Amazon came just two years later and GOOG 3-4.
[dead] redmen
kjeetgill
I suppose it might depend on how old you are what you even see Facebook as.

It's not that incredibly onesided a conversation that you can't even fathom a legitimate belief that Facebook, for all it's faults might still be a beer good.

scarface74
Google became popular because it was easy just to go to from a web browser. Microsoft was never going to block web pages. By the time Chrome came out, Firefox was already winning market share from IE when people just voluntarily downloaded it. No there was no browser choice mandate in the US.

Chrome became popular because it was advertised on the most popular website in the US and bundled with other downloads.

The government lawsuit had absolutely no effect.

cmdr2
End of Bill Gates in the driver's seat, for better or for worse.
UIUC_06
David Boies got an undeserved reputation out of it as the killer cross-examination lawyer. People used to do the "Jaws" theme when he approached the witness stand. I think Gates made it too easy for him.

Since then, he completely soiled himself with Theranos and trying to intimidate the whistleblowers and the press.

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Bubble_Pop_22
Without the DOJ lawsuit, 3 things off the top of my mind:

Apple would not exist.

Google would not have android as part as their Berhshire Hathaway-esque portfolio of technologies/companies. They'd have still beaten Microsoft in the search engine business.

Somebody would have killed Bill Gates or at least tried to, like it has happened with many POTUS. The person who is perceived as #1 will get all sorts of lunatics after them. (You could argue that is a safety system that nature installed in humans in order to avoid one person to monopolize decisionmaking) . Kinda like a more severe and irrevocable DOJ.

scarface74
The DOJ lawsuit had nothing to do with Apple existing. The measly $250 million investment didn’t “save Apple”. Apple turned around and used $100 million of that to buy out PowerComputing’s Mac license.
gcbasdf
for older people in the industry the comment was clear to understand it was about Microsoft not being able to kill the iphone and consequently macs by simply forcing verizon and ATT to not sell the devices effectively, like they did on the PC business.
scarface74
I don’t think they get too much older than me…

But MS had absolutely no leverage on the phone carriers. By the time the iPhone came out, Apple was riding high because of the iPod. Verizon didn’t accept Apple’s terms until they started losing customer to AT&T.

musicale
As I understand it, Verizon initially refused the iPhone, probably due to Apple's requirements of unmetered data and selling unsubsidized phones at full price, so the iPhone launched exclusively on Cingular/AT&T in the US.

I'm not sure what leverage Microsoft would have had over AT&T or Verizon to block the iPhone.

scarface74
Apple’s terms were no carrier installed bloatware and they get to update their own phones.
snapdaddy
My recollection of the time was that it was the port of Microsoft Office that made Apple viable as an alternative operating system (which was a result of the DOJ pressure, and not because Bill Gates was feeling charitable). Without office compatibility, you were locked out of all business communications.
scarface74
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were first available on the Mac in the mid 80s and had continuously been updated.
cbozeman
> The measly $250 million investment didn’t “save Apple”.

Yes it did, but not in the way you're thinking.

Microsoft's investment into Apple and devotion to a dev team to port Office to Mac OS was what re-instilled developer confidence in the platform.

If you recall, Apple had $2 billion in cash and had just spent $500,000,000 on NeXT. The $250,000,000 investment helped ease the burden, but it was Microsoft standing behind the platform that really saved it. Same reason the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will be Year Never... developers don't develop for Linux Desktop because they have no faith in the platform one day becoming a huge market dominating offering that could share the spotlight with Windows and Mac OS.

And for the pedantic people out there, when I say "developers don't develop for Linux Desktop", I - obviously - mean developers of consequence. There is no Microsoft Office for Linux Desktop. There is no Adobe Creative Cloud Suite for Linux Desktop. I can keep going. The major players - the ones that matter - don't waste their time with it.

scarface74
Microsoft didn’t port Office to Mac after the agreement. They agreed to continue supporting Mac.

Microsoft Excel was first introduced for the Mac in 1987. Word was first introduced in 1986. PowerPoint was originally a Mac application that was acquired by MS.

In fact, MS always had a Mac team. Bill Gates was on stage with Jobs at the introduction of the first Mac.

I had Excel and Word back in 1992 on my Mac LCII. Of course it was pirated. They were like $300 a piece.

mistrial9
I believe I have testimony PDF from two or three of the major witness' .. "knife the baby" included.. many of those documents said things in public that had never been confirmed, regarding cozy business aka monopoly practice with Dell, Intuit and others.. maybe they are on the web but might be hard to find at first...
GWBullshit
>> In general, what changed after threat of break up

Howard Hughes' approach to tax evasion resurfaced.

pessimizer
I think the main effect was that the industry was assured that no matter how big the talk was, or how elaborate the ritual was, antitrust would never be seriously applied to software.
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randombits0
Not much. People seemed to have forgotten that Bill Gates encouraged many shady business practices at the expense of innovation, was a serial purjurer (felony) and monopolist, and presently feel that Gates, a college dropout, is somehow an expert in communicable diseases and pandemics.
oblio
The biggest thing is that FAANG learned to avoid Microsoft's mistakes, up to a point, and for example a bunch of them have policies where they destroy documents after a certain period plus they train employees to not put stuff in writing.

It will be much harder to prove something against them because proof will be gone.

heymijo
They lobby.

That’s the primary lesson learned.

Microsoft, in its hubris, did not.

oblio
Ah, forgot that! Yup, another big lesson.
tomohawk
That, and it taught them that they needed (a) a large law staff involved in all aspects of the busines, and (b) political connections in DC.

That 2nd aspect has led to them getting entangled in all kinds of partisan shenanigans.

gdhkgdhkvff
This is the type of comment I dislike on hackernews. This is said with such authority and uses preconceived notions of the “big tech boogie man” that people assume it’s true.

I work in big tech at one of the named companies. This is just flat out incorrect and actually the opposite of what happens. We’re trained TO write things down because, surprise surprise, it helps to be able to look up reasons for previous decisions.

The idea that leadership in a company with 100,000+ employees would hand down an edict that you shouldn’t write down decisions anywhere to avoid legal liability is laughable.

dagmx
Agreed. Whenever I see comments like that it's almost a guarantee they're not someone who works in the places they're talking about.

It's pure FUD.

Arainach
I've worked at Microsoft and other BigN companies and the training and culture around what gets written down is absolutely there at any big enough to have been sued.

This is why you're reminded to not discuss ongoing lawsuits over email. It's why you're reminded to never use aggressive language like "we will crush our competitor" or legally sensitive language like "I think this will harm our customers". It's why mail retention/litigation hold exists, and why most people who end up in retention will go out of their way to call or tall in person rather than over chat or email.

There are two kinds of people: those that think retention policies and these trainings are stupid, and those that have been proximate to a lawsuit and understand exactly why these rules exist.

I had plenty of managers and PMs at Microsoft who went out of their way to keep things off email; that instinct wasn't as strong at Google, but that'd because Google hasn't gone through a lawsuit of that magnitude.

There's a great internal copypasta by a lawyer at Microsoft titled "Apropos of Nothing" that goes into the specific legal details and dollar implications of this kind of language but it's not publicly available.

MichaelMoser123
Well, you got different channels for communication.

- you have corporate email, where every message is being archived

- you have a corporate messenger and i am not sure that every discussion is being archived here.

You can guess that these distinctions do exist for a purpose.

cbozeman
Yeah, you work at one...

But you don't work in a serious capacity with serious leadership over serious projects, as your comment shows. The Department of Justice doesn't care about the comments in your code or your meticulous documentation of your company's APIs. They care about emails which allege or allude to illegal activity.

Lammy
Let’s take this offline.
srb4
Practically speaking it had little effect, but as a college student in CS during the trial it helped to solidify a very negative impression of Microsoft. The cool technologies at the time were not coming out of Redmond. UNIX/Linux, Java, and web technologies were the hot things to learn. It took a long time for Microsoft to try to earn back the trust of developers.
pigtailgirl
-- it was known outside of tech - for me & I think others it taught us who microsoft was - they notoriously didn't do interviews or spend a lot of time on press - back then it was clear M$ was focused on the business & apple was focused on products - Steve was out there community building but Bill really wasn't - generally people didn't trust microsoft a great deal at the time - so it didn't come as a surprise - but the trial really showed us who Bill was at that time & what was going on at M$ - suspicions for those us totally outside of the "tech scene" but still using tech were certainly confirmed - the second thing was people became a lot less flagrant about trying to obviously dominate a whole stack --
majani
All Microsoft were ultimately trying to do was to insert their business model on to the web. Chances are that without the anti trust case, right now the web would have a lot more areas with an enterprise sales cycle rather than the self-serve sales that is prevalent now.
rkagerer
I think Gates has mentioned it distracted the company from other work on product innovations at the time.
MichaelMoser123
Microsoft was involved in a number of high profile court cases:

- The one over internet explorer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

- Sun vs Microsoft over the attempt to "embrace and extinguish" the Java virtual machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine

I would argue that that second court case was more significant, as it was not a fact that standards were something that could be upheld in court.

Also the JDK has had more of a lasting impact on the industry, at least it exists longer than both netscape navigator and internet explorer.