Comment Of The Day: Chrome, Android, and the Cloud
The amazing thing is how people thought there needed to be an antitrust case against Microsoft for something as obviously necessary as integrating an html rendering engine into an operating system. Happily Google came along and showed once again a new business model is far more effective than a bunch of lawyers.
Originally posted as a comment by Ranjit Mathoda on A VC using Disqus.
Comments (Archived):
Come on, Fred. The problem wasn’t MS adding HTML browsing capability to the OS, but, rather, the subsequent requirements MS placed on its OEM licensees.
Actually, that’s not accurate.Microsoft wasn’t penalised for integrating html rendering into an operating system.Having a monopoly is not illegal, and creating integrated products is not illegal either.The illegal thing is to abuse monopoly power to destroy the competition.(something Microsoft has consistently done in that, and other industries before, and after the aforementioned Antitrust case)That’s what Antitrust law is really about.
This is precisely backwards. It’s”Both Microsoft and Google showed the world how to build and dominate great new markets and then attempted to build illegal trusts by adding html rendering to their products and services in an attempt to extend their natural monopolies into the huge majority of related businesses.”