Comment by Imustaskforhelp
1 day ago
To be really honest yeah.
Not sure why people downvoted but this is sort of true
Microsoft was absolutely dominating and buying up everything (similar to today's tech giants) and they were literally the most mega corporation ever
Until they got hit by the monopoly lawsuit. That alone scared microsoft so much that it backed off
After the backing off is when Companies like google, heck Apple was directly invested to be saved by microsoft just so that they dont get threatened by the govt as monopoly and amazon.
In a way people mention so why couldn't Microsoft create their own engine but its also the fact that blink/chromium is based on fork of webkit which itself is a fork of KHTML from the kde team but webkit added many features (from what I could tell) and is a really complex software in it of itself
This was created by apple and apple as we know it would not have been able to exist without Microsoft backing off them
My point here is that in previous times, Microsoft was a large curtain blocking any innovation if they wanted but after it was feared by even a threat like monopoly, they took it very seriously and thus we have the cultural innovation in many ways that we have
Now the monopoly question was a genuine question still launched by the government.
Today the landscape is different, Google and these large tech companies would buy things and the meta strategy has become to sell, its a very cynical point of things which really just ends up screwing the customers in the end.
The government doesn't care, it might slap some 1% fine and there is a quote that if crime's punishment becomes only fines, then crime becomes legal and the fines compared to company are so small and they got legal structure so high that they strech it for as much as possible
Overall, the govt.'s being really lobbied by these tech giants and they stiffle tech innovation in the end
In the end all of them are the same, they all kind of want to be a microsoft pre monopoly era.
Govt's lack of understanding of the matters around the world is the reason why tech feels so intrusive. This has real consequences to you and me, now I don't trust the govt will be able to improve if its gets lobbied or corrupted and that's a seperate matter and might take new laws all around the world to prevent such corruption / lobbying but right now, the other best thing is to showcase support by being the minor fraction of the population who supports/donates to open source / msme businesses
I doubt Microsoft gives a minute's thought to government monopoly concerns. One of their "punishments" after the monopoly lawsuit was to give schools free copies of Microsoft Office products. Teachers and administrators adopted them, forcing parents to also buy copies of Office. Now practically everyone's documents are locked up in Office formats, which Microsoft can change on a whim. Sure, there are products to read Office formats with varying levels of success, but Microsoft has the control and can make everyone jump through hoops whenever they feel like it.
Well yes but I feel like its because the threats of monopolization got less and less due to lobbying efforts but for the time, there are reports where microsoft was scared in the internal emails after what happened.
"Microsoft was more scared of taking over companies that were competitors because of this anti trust trial. They had to back off a little and this created this tiny little gap, this little window from which many flowers can bloom. These flowers ended up growing into massive trillion dollars competitors (google and apple)"
Per Atrioc (https://youtu.be/VS6p5kPeD9I?si=PUT4R5a7Y4kiIvD2&t=692) [Title of the video being the Halo scheme is insane talking about groq's weird acquisition by nvidia]
I would consider that much of what I wrote in the previous comment was I think something I had thought about but this particular video definitely helped me and you could say did influence me in a way to write the comment.
It also mentions how it was provable that Microsoft was scared about it. I am not sure about this contradiction though but I would consider that it atleast created a gap for around 10-18 years from which the tech giants emerged.