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You are wise, my minion.

Ahhh... "slightly abusing". You know, in the way which leads to a federal lawsuit.

Understood. You only had to say I was right, you know.

Given that Gbaji's question was to name a business where the federal government acted to break up or prevent a monopoly, I'd say it applies. It's safe to say that they are no longer abusing the Windows platform to push people into using IE.

No. My question was to name a business which became a monopoly *without* government involvement/help. While we can debate whether MS was really ever a monopoly when it comes to pushing IE on people (since that problem was "solved" by the free market and not government), we can absolutely say that since it started lobbying the government, it's expanded its monopolistic tendencies into other much more customer harmful areas.

Do you even know how much impact SOX has had in terms of effectively forcing corporations to use MS products in a bunch of ways that they didn't before? Messaging and the AD security model have become almost necessary to maintain in order to meet the security requirements in that regulation (and I use the term "security" loosely). That in turn forces companies to buy user licenses for a much larger percentage of their employee base than they would have otherwise. MS basically used its lobbying to get the government to create regulations in order to force customers to buy more copies of its software.


And that's *exactly* the sort of public/private corruption which started this sub-thread. It's arguably much worse than anything a free market monopoly could accomplish.

As Gbaji pointed out, a lot of federal regulations lend themselves to stuff that Microsoft has available on their servers - security features, etc. So Microsoft has a fairly solid lock on enterprise server operating systems for smaller to midsize businesses. IBM and Oracle(Solaris) duke it out over the big data centers and Linux is the el cheapo alternative for universities and very tiny businesses and larger website based businesses. But Microsoft has a pretty solid lock on stuff like hospitals, where the EHR software will only run on a Windows server.

Really, though, that's more because the ERP solutions are only programmed to run on Windows, not that Windows forces ERP solutions to write exclusively for them. The companies that make them could totally code them to run on Linux too, if they wanted to do twice the work for twice the money.

gbaji wanted the name of a monopoly, not Alma. Smoke moar.

At its height (before the lawsuit was settled with the Bush justice department, IE had a 95% share. Today, it's about 25%. You must be using some of that conservative math the Heritage Foundation uses


I'm not sure why you bother lying about things you wrote a page ago.

Was Microsoft's browser business a monopoly? Yes. At least according to the people whose job it is to monitor those activities which matters more to me than the desperate ramblings of an "expert" losing an argument about his own field. Did the government act to prevent this monopoly? Yes. Was this browser monopoly the result of government regulation prior to the fact? As you keep pointing out for me (thanks!), no.

Edited, Dec 1st 2011 8:34am by Jophiel

95% isn't 100% so I guess it just wasn't a monopoly, Joph. See, if it wasn't a technically, by definition, to the strictest terms monopoly then, it can't be any less of one now.






I have to admit, gbaji logic is kinda fun.

Lobbying is essentially bribing the government to do what you want, right?

No. I know that market share is only half of what might make something a monopoly. The absence of the ability to control prices and ensure lack of competition means that MS didn't actually have a monopoly on desktop browsers back then. If they had they would not have lost so much market share over the next decade, would they? And, as you've admitted, the governments actions with their much vaunted anti-trust suit didn't have a damn thing to do with it.

The free market prevailed. Simple as that.



I'm not sure what happened to your reading comprehension.



Should have been obvious that the point I was making is that it's nearly impossible to find examples of actual real monopolies in which the government was not involved in creating or maintaining said monopoly. That's why I asked you to think of a monopoly and then think about whether it used government help to achieve it. What did you think I was asking that series of questions for?



No. It wasn't. I know you don't want to hear this, but it wasn't.



Which is kinda meaningless when the entire point of my argument is to say that "those people whose job it is to monitor those activities" are the ones who engaged in the sort of public/private corruption in the first place. They are more interested in making sure that large corporations pay their protection money to the government than whether they actually have an unfair advantage in the marketplace. So forgive me if the DOJ deciding that MS's browser bundling represented a violation of anti-trust laws doesn't impress me as much as it does you.




No, it didn't! And you damn well know it. After nearly 4 years of action, the government basically slapped MS on the wrist and did *nothing* to prevent the very thing they claimed was in violation in the first place (bundling of IE into the Windows OS). Have you purchased a copy of Windows lately? Have you noticed that it still comes bundled with IE?

The government's actions accomplished only one thing: It forced MS to start giving money to politicians in order to avoid getting sued by the DoJ any more. And in the process, it gave MS the power to engage in actual corrupt business practices in the form of effectively writing the server security regulations in a way which benefited their business.




And? Of course it wasn't. You're missing the point. MS uses more abusive business tactics *since* that lawsuit than they did before. Prior to that point, their marketing strategy was aggressive and it hurt their competitors, but it largely benefited their consumers. Since that point, their strategy has shifted into exactly the sorts of price controls and forced consumption which usually defines something as a monopoly. I think you really just don't understand how directly the government regulations effectively force businesses to use MS products.

That was never the case before the government decided to get involved. Again, this ties back to my original point which is whether it's better to get more or less government regulation as a means of dealing with unfair/corrupt business practices. Clearly, the answer should be "less government".

That would sting a lot more if it wasn't for the fact that anyone with a greater than 2nd grade reading level could clearly see that I was attempting to get people to name monopolies and then show them that those monopolies existed/grew/thrived/whatever because of government action and not because of an absence of it. Clearly that has been the case even with MS, right? Their business practices have gotten more abusive since that lawsuit, not less.

And MS is probably the best case argument for a big monopolistic company arising with a minimum of government intervention. They're the rare case of a company getting that big in an industry before the government shows up to make them "play ball". But feel free to continue to believe that the government helped us out in this case. Cause that's hysterical from where I'm sitting.



Microsoft already shared its API with third party companies. It had been doing that for nearly a decade before the ruling (since the Windows3x days really). How the hell do you think anyone ever wrote any code which ran in Windows in the first place? Requiring them to do something they already did may look good on paper, but it really had no effect at all.

What MS has always been in the practice of doing, however, is changing its API(s) periodically and in ways which their own internal software development methodology could take advantage of, while leaving competitors having to scramble to write a patch to make their competing software work. Um... I hate to tell this to you, but MS still does that today. It never stopped doing this. People just got better at updating their competing code (largely a result of a move away from big corp competition to the various opensource methods). It had nothing to do with the judgment in that suit.



Somehow I'm not shaking in my boots over you calling me a fool when I know literally 200 times more about this subject than you do. I'm not "pretending" that the MS ruling had nothing to do with the rise of those other browsers, I know that it had nothing to do with it. What had the most to do with the rise of those browsers was the shift from a "competing company" model, to a "open software" model. You can't compete with MS head on. No one could. And the judgment didn't change that. You work around MS's model by not playing their game.

Why do you suppose that pretty much every direct competitor to MS has disappeared from the computer market *since* that ruling? What has replaced them is a host of smaller companies distributing builds of open software, which collectively can compete with MS (sorta). The original competitors have all had to move into other niche markets to stay solvent.

When was the last time you actually paid for a browser? Think about that.




Nah. They still do that. Never stopped doing that. What happened was that while a traditionally modeled company could not make adjustments to changes in Windows fast enough to keep their products working, the open software devs can do it within hours of any change. You may have missed it, but there was a bit of a battle in the mid 2000s, with MS releasing changes regularly with the same "break everyone else" result, but it didn't work. MS realized that it cost it too much money to keep making changes, when some guy sitting in his bedroom slippers could release code to "fix" their adjustment immediately afterwards. MS can't compete against "free", so it stopped trying.

Again though, that didn't have anything to do with the lawsuit. Had the government's actions actually limited MS's power to control the market, they'd still have actual real competition today. But they really don't. Not in the context of earning money and market share they don't.

Edited, Dec 1st 2011 7:32pm by gbaji

Hey Giberrish boy I gave you your 5 companies that the government stepped in and said no you don't. Where is my damn cookie.