Microsoft embodies the idea that you either die a rebel hero or live long enough to become the evil emperor you dethroned.
Bill Gates didn't become one of the richest people on earth simply by emerging from a lucky womb:
He also owed his success to vigorous antitrust enforcement.
The IBM PC was his company's first major initiative, after it was targeted by the DOJ for a 12-year antitrust enforcement action.
IBM tapped its vast monopoly profits to fight the DOJ, spending more on outside counsel to fight the DOJ antitrust division than the DOJ spent on all its antitrust lawyers, every year, for 12 years -- and IBM's delaying tactic paid off:
When Reagan took the White House, he let IBM off the hook.
But the company was still seriously scarred by its ordeal,
and when the PC project kicked off, the company kept the OS separate from the hardware
(one of the DOJ's major issues with IBM's previous behavior was its vertical monopoly on hardware and software).
IBM didn't hire Gates and Allen to provide it with DOS because it was incapable of writing a PC operating system:
they did it to keep the DOJ from kicking down their door again.
The post-antitrust, gunshy IBM kept delivering dividends for Microsoft.
When IBM turned a blind eye to cloned PC-ROMs and allowed companies like Compaq, Dell and Gateway to compete directly with Big Blue,
this produced a whole cohort of customers for Microsoft
– customers Microsoft could play off on each other, ensuring that every PC sold generated income for Microsoft,
creating a wide moat around the OS business that kept other OS vendors out of the market:
Why invest in making an OS when every hardware company already had an exclusive arrangement with Microsoft?
The IBM PC story teaches us two things:
stronger antitrust enforcement
-- and weaker IP protections
-- spur innovation and open markets for scrappy startups to grow to be big, important firms.
Microsoft learned the opposite:
Monopolies are wildly profitable;
Expansive IP protects monopolies;
You can violate antitrust laws so long as you have enough monopoly profits rolling in to outspend the government -- until a Republican bootlicker takes the White House
(Microsoft's antitrust ordeal ended after GW Bush stole the 2000 election and dropped the charges against them).
Cory Doctorow (npub1fdr…lvhs)
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/14/patch-tuesday/
Chuck Darwin /
npub189…vstm6
2024-06-14 21:09:01
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