What Happened to the Microsoft Monopoly?

This article skips over the direct role that United States v. Microsoft had in creating space for innovative companies like Apple to succeed. Without the US anti-trust intervention it's quite possible Microsoft would have totally embraced, extended, and extinguished open Web technologies and subsumed the Web into a Microsoft proprietary platform. Macs would not be nearly as viable a product if Internet Explorer were the only browser that worked with most web sites.<p>Another important part of the history is Microsoft's June 1997 $150m investment lifeline to Apple when Apple was worth less than $4B. That investment predates US v Microsoft but at the time it was widely believed that part of Microsoft's motivation was ensuring Apple didn't go completely broke and thus invite even more monopoly scrutiny to the PC business.

It's impossible to conclude from the evidence presented that the antitrust action had no effect on the breaking down of Microsoft's monopoly. It's entirely plausible that the enforcement left them unable to respond as quickly to new markets as their competitors, leading to them beginning to get undermined a few years later. Abusing their monopoly in the PC OS market to get advantages in unrelated markets was in many complaints against Microsoft at the time.<p>It's entirely within reason to believe that had the Justice Department not been breathing down their necks that Microsoft would have used its monopolies to illegally squash the original iPod. There are plenty of examples of products that were well-made, innovative, and desired but didn't make a major market impact for poorly-understood reasons (WebOS comes to mind). It's not at all obvious that the iPod was bound to succeed; if all those amorphous outside factors hadn't gone its way, we could be sitting around discussing how the iPod was a repeat of the Newton, and how inevitable it was that Microsoft finally cracked the the MP3 market with Plays4Sure.

This article misses the forest for the trees. During the height of Microsoft's monopoly, consumers were very much limited in their choices. MS did everything they could to keep the likes of OS/2 and BeOS off of new PCs, and that means no one ran other OS's, so no one wrote apps for them. Had that not been the case, the PCs, phones, and tablets we use today would be very different. I daresay they'd be better, for having arrived at many current innovations sooner due to the more robust level of competition and potentially having more viable options in the market today.<p>Just because MS lost its monopoly on its own does not mean that we, as consumers, would not have benefitted--and would still be benefitting--from breaking up that monopoly when it was more dominant.

University of Chicago economics professor says government regulation not needed? Why am I not surprised?

I wonder how many people who argued about Linux vs BSD in early 90s would have predicted that 20 years later, in the post-PC-era, these would be the two most popular operating systems by far, backed by the two biggest post-Microsoft tech companies, Google and Apple.

I'm surprised by the large Android figures there. For a time OSX became the most widely distributed unix-like consumer system and that was exciting. But despite a strong play, it's being overtaken by android. Looking at these numbers, if I was starting a consulting business at the moment I'd be tempted to focus at android.

The rebirth of Netscape navigator, JQuery and XMLHttpRequest happened to the Microsoft Monopoly.

I have to admit that graphs using logarithmic scaling can come quite handy when trying to make a certain point.

We should be happy Microsoft is not a monopoly anymore, and instead of trying to encourage them to come back to that position, we should encourage the competition to even things out some more.

The only way Microsoft, like IBM before it, could have held onto its market position was if the government stepped in and specifically protected it.