More that MS was using their marketshare in operating systems to get the upper hand on the competition in a related area (not sure if that area was web browsers or web servers though, as the whole intranet thing was going on back then).
Now if Apple made it real hard to play any content from ITMS outside of Apple products, that may be cause for concern. And they did get slapped on the wrist about ebook pricing.
I think there may be a valid line of reasoning here but I’m not quite feeling it. Seems like MS vs was about stifling competition via market share which isn’t the issue here, the issue here is people not waiting to pay Apple the cost of distribution on their platform.
It appears so. I guess my main point was that MS seems to be trying to do what Apple does (limit hardware, make tough choices), but when you have vendors and partners that strategy is pretty rough on them.
You're changing the subject after your wild claims are shown to be trivially wrong?
But ok, I can comment:
As was noted in my first reference, there were non-published money amounts also paid by Microsoft. So they did pay more.
Microsoft were busy using their monopoly to kill the browser competition at the time, see the IE part of the deal, so going for Apple right then was probably not in the cards. Mostly, Msoft illegally (according to legal results) murdered just one major enemy at a time -- and got bad legal problems even then.
Microsoft got into trouble because they were a supplier to computer companies (they supplied the OS and some software) and abused their market share to mess with other suppliers (browser makers).
Apple is themselves the computer maker. The situation is not similar even though both MS and Apple are big companies.
MS went through anti-trust investigation for more than just bundling IE, and at the time commanded a much larger market share¹ of desktop computing than Apple do of the mobile market now.
But while your comparison is flawed, I agree with the assertion² that Apple should not be locking user choice like this. The EU agree too, hence Apple's immature little hissy fit nearly breaking their (already "not quite there") offline-first app support for EU users when they were told so.
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[1] Avoiding the word "monopoly" to pre-counter the sort of "well actually" responses I got about dictionary definitions last time I said something like this.
[2] Unless I'm reading you backwards and you are saying MS should have been able to like Apple currently do!
What landed them in Federal Court was bundling a browser (the most advanced at the time) with their OS for free. Over a decade later, we all know that a consumer OS that ships without a browser is an incomplete product (as BillG testified in the case).
What Apple is doing now with dictatorial actions in its app stores is just as, if not more, overreaching IMHO. Does that make it OK? No.
But keep in mind why people were actually interested in what MS had to offer back then. Just as we still buy Apple products despite their anti-competitive behavior, people bought MSFT products in the largely because the product addressed their needs better than others and the price was right.
Imagine if MS had done the shit Apple is doing and blocked iTunes from Windows because it didn’t “add enough new functionality”.
And then when it eventually did allow a gimped version of iTunes charged Apple 30% of all the music and movies sold on it.
If they were being Apple like they would probably have even started charging 20% of the album price of every music CD users ripped to their iPods using iTunes.
And MS was a far more ruthless company. If it wasn’t afraid of anti monopolistic regulation it would have come up with other ideas I can’t imagine in a 1000 years to have absolutely destroyed Apple.
Depends on perspective. For MS I'm pretty sure we weren't counting servers, mainframes, etc. And them replying "just buy a Mac if you don't like it" wouldn't have been acceptable.
Apple has a complete iOS / iTunes monopoly in the iPhone/iPad market, which is pretty big. And Microsoft wasn't preventing the existence of alternative browser engines or banning apps competing with them, whereas Apple does.
The real question is why would MS risk losing the business from Apple in such a context.
There are ways to set up incentives such that large corporations will follow the rules. There are myriad examples of this. But in most cases you can ask what is more profitable: Taking $1B+ a year from Apple for hosting an internal ChatGPT service from them, or maybe, if they're lucky, stealing trade secret that MS will never be able to compete against Apple with anyway?
This is all hypothetical; I just want to point out that these businesses are not just waiting to do evil things, they simply respond to incentives, like any business.
That's a lot different than functionality being added to the OS. What Apple is doing is effectively what MS got in trouble for. Apple is adding functionality to the OS that exists as a standalone application out of the OS (this is probaby the main reason why antivirus doesn't ship in the box with Windows).
The question MS had to answer was if this functionality was crucial to the operation of the OS. The TCP/IP stack apparently was deemed so. IE wasn't deemed crucial.
The difference between MS and Apple is that MS had a desktop monopoly. Apple has no such monopoly in mobile devices. Although if Apple keeps touting their 90% tablet market share, they could inadvertantly put themselves in the middle of antitrust crosshairs again.
I know Marco has said that he would not use legal means to stop Apple -- but he shouldn't rule it out forever. Because trust me, Apple would have no problem doing it to him.
I find this so very weird as I remember the days when Microsoft locked their users into msft only solutions. Now we have msft competing on interoperability, while Apple is the new monopolist that ties their customers down to locked in environment.
I suppose this is evidence that governments should be more quick to interfere with the free market if a monopolist is playing unfair.
Yes, I didn't mean Apple is going the MS route from a technical point of view, just the timing of their platform independence efforts leads me to believe that it has to do with pressure (or the potential thereof) by Microsoft.
Now if Apple made it real hard to play any content from ITMS outside of Apple products, that may be cause for concern. And they did get slapped on the wrist about ebook pricing.
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