Actually I’d hazard a guess that AOL and its ubiquitous CD were most people’s introduction to a browser.
With an established path on a site you can do something equivalent from a windows command line.
Consider the case of “third party forcing”.
You, the first party, purchase of Windows from Microsoft, the second party.
Well imagine if they bundled Netscape, and said that they had already paid for it… So they forced you to buy Netscape… the third party.
So the DoJ argument was that it doesn’t matter who the owner of “Netscape” is… If it was microsoft, that is just as wrong as if it isn’t Microsoft. And neither does it matter that it is Internet Explorer and not Netscape, its a substantial program , not some sort of system utility, and the end users would be better served if there was competition in the development of that program.
You can see where the DoJ was headed …
Netscape was dying, Internet Explorer was dominating, it looked like that Apple was dying… Microsoft in fact propped up Apple !
What if Ford bought up all the gas companies, and then said “But we only sell to Ford vehicles ! Oh we can sell you higher priced special fuel for other vehicles.” ? That would be wrong wouldn’t it. The idea is that you can’t allow competition to decline too far… The USA government in fact has a policy that it should encourage competition … and keep costs down … by avoiding being “held over a barrel” by monopoly suppliers… That means that they buy computers from companies that also sell AMD cpu as well as intel cpu… That way the vendor can’t claim the monopoly CPU maker is forcing prices up …
DoJ was wondering if the market was going to become Microsoft only…
I don’t follow this. Surely that would be against anti trust laws or something?
In the UK, my Android phone syncs easily with my car.
Not. At. All.
In fact Apple doesn’t make any Car stereo adapters, radios, or in-car electronics of any kind. Their “Lightning” adapters and UI (Carplay) are available to any manufacturer who wants to include them in their vehicles, and third-parties can use these (and earlier) technologies to support older cars.
So, in this case, it’s simply that the market has decided that this is the most profitable direction to go.
It’s like complaining that Adobe doesn’t have a version of Photoshop for Linux.
That’s exactly it (I’m running real low on sleep these days).
Unless there’s been a major change in the last four years, I haven’t seen anything that will allow for a quality connection (at that time the only option was to use some a/m cord that provided for a very weak sound).
That’s because Apple was way smarter and prescient than everyone else. First with the 30-pin and later the Lightning connector, they made it easy to have audio/video and control in one connector, across all devices. As far as I know, there’s nothing like it in the Android world.
The issue was that PCs with Windows thoroughly dominated the market. People cite 90%, but it’s even higher if you only looked at new sales.
Nowadays, you have browsers built in to the device, but you also have more choices on what device you get. So even Apple locking out some of their browser APIs on iOS isn’t considered a problem.
If we were still more concerned with consumer protection, rather than big business, we’d probably be doing the same thing the EU is doing, which allows people a choice of which web browser to install. But only in PCs, because that’s the only place that still has anywhere near a monopoly.
Well, what are the odds that anything’s changed in consumer electronics in a paltry four years?
Nope, upon release Netscape was free for non-commercial users, I downloaded it myself. You could choose to pay for it on physical media, I expect, and I think they later decided to charge for it for non-academic use, but it was initially free. Oh, and Mosaic was free prior to (and after) the release of Netscape.
This is a good question. The original antitrust investigation against Microsoft was by the Federal Trade Commission. This was based on the idea that Microsoft was colluding with IBM to control the PC operating system market. This case was resolved in the early 1990s, upon which the DOJ took up another antitrust action, this time alleging that Microsoft was preventing competition by shipping an internet browser along with its operating system.
Since the definition of antitrust is a collusion or cartel between multiple companies to suppress competition, it has never been clearly articulated how antitrust laws empower regulatory actions equating to setting industrial policy. You can query on those search terms and see various legal white papers debating this.
The DOJ action in 1994 resulted in a consent decree where the DOJ agreed to drop the antitrust action, and which explicitly let Microsoft retain the right to develop “integrated products”.
Despite this in 1997 DOJ filed suit against Microsoft, saying they had violated the consent decree due to shipping Internet Explorer with Windows.
There were many twists and turns in the case, and many players both visible and less visible. The bottom line is in the mid-1990s Microsoft had about 90% market share in PC operating systems, and today nothing has changed in that regard. The latest numbers show Windows market share on PC platforms is about 91%: Windows 10: Can It Help Microsoft Win in Mobile? | Time
Of course today we have additional computing platforms such as mobile devices. However in the 1990s there were also various platforms such as mainframes, network operating systems (back before this was integrated into typical PC OSs), workstations, etc. In the early 1990s Novell dominated PC networking with an over 70% market share. IBM’s market share in mainframes was about 80% in 1995.
In the 1990s PCs (like today) were simply one element of the overall IT marketplace. They were visible to the end user but the total revenue of the entire PC market segment was a relatively small part of the overall computing market.
When the FTC began antitrust action against Microsoft in the early 1990s, Microsoft’s total annual revenues were about $1.8 billion. In that same year IBM’s revenues were $65 billion.
By 1995 when the DOJ antitrust action was winding up, Microsoft’s annual revenues were about $5.9 billion and IBM’s were $72 billion. So this gives a rough view of the overall proportion of the PC vs mainframe market segment in that period.
By contrast past antitrust actions such as those against Kodak (who formerly had 96% of the total film market) were taken when consumers had absolutely no alternative because there was only a single supplier for that entire market.
Several books have been written about the Microsoft antitrust case. You can search on Microsoft antitrust in Amazon.com and see those.
Antitrust actions cover all kinds of anticompetitive uses of market power. One way to do that is to form a cartel. Another way is for a single company with monopoly power to leverage that power to gain market power in another market.
not at all. couple reasons:
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until now (with Android Auto) there was no universal, standard way for an audio head unit (AHU) to interface with an Android handset. Some of them just connected as a USB mass storage or an MTP device, some supported Mirrorlink (and the list of supported handsets was pretty tiny,) and so on. Apple was way ahead of anything Android in creating a standardized way to connect to any iOS device; and they’ve only changed it once.
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now that Android Auto exists you’ll generally find that an AHU which supports CarPlay also supports Android Auto.
Sorry, but Netscape was definitely paid software back in those days. If you didn’t want to pay, you could always use Lynx or Mosaic. Computers weren’t usually preloaded with any web browser, either.
Netscape stopped charging for the software after Microsoft started giving away MSIE for free. It put them at a massive disadvantage, since they didn’t have cash flow from other products.
Netscape’s idea at the time was that they would earn money from their server products, and give Navigator away for free like Microsoft was doing with IE.
It was not a terrible plan, except for the fact that their server products blew.
Which strengthened the antitrust case against MIcrosoft - drastically cutting prices is a classic example of abuse of dominant position, since it drives weaker competitors out of the market, regardless of the strength of their product.
and Navigator didn’t?
The thing is, once upon a time (DOS, Windows prior to 95) pretty much every little utility that we now think of as part of the operating system, was once a standalone app that various companies competed with each other on.
For example, there were extended memory managers, ram-disk apps (what a quaint idea), disk defragmenters, file-system checkers, notepads/text editors, terminal windows, and even the networking protocol stacks, all available from third-party sellers and/or as shareware/freeware.
Microsoft had made a habit of doing a pair of things- buying the companies and then integrating their products into their operating systems, or just including that functionality in their operating system for “free” and thereby driving the competition out of business, or seriously hurting them.
At the point when all the business in the suit started, there were a handful of browsers out there, but Netscape was by far the market leader. For commercial users, it cost something like $49 bucks. All browsers were stand-alone products at that point, until Microsoft started integrating IE into Windows starting with IE3 and claiming that it was a feature of the OS, not a standalone application.
Previous to this point, most of the little apps that Microsoft had inserted as “features” into Windows could legitimately be considered OS functions- disk scanning/defrag, memory management, etc… were all things that other operating systems did include as standard functionality.
But browsers were a new thing, and in a strict sense, are NOT part of the operating system, but are applications. They may be a very vital application for modern computer use, but they’re not an operating system function.
So Netscape cried foul; to them, it seemed like Microsoft as the producer of the operating system, was using that market leverage to absolutely kill their market share, because people basically got the browser for free when they got the operating system.
It was more of a predatory pricing /general assholery case, in that it didn’t really benefit Microsoft too much, since you had to have Windows back then for all intents and purposes and they didn’t profit from IE being bundled, but it did unduly screw Netscape. It was just anti-competitive without being profitable.
And, like most of the cases against Microsoft, it hinged on their monopoly of the operating system- back then (1997-1998), Apple was just rising out of the grave with the iMac G3, and Linux was still the nerdy footnote of personal computing that it’s always been. Basically, the idea was that since Microsoft pretty much had the ONE piece of software (the OS) that is required to use the hardware on a computer, they had enormous power to take advantage of that in all sorts of anti-competitive ways.
Nowadays, there’s enough competition that Apple doing very similar things with their walled garden approach and proprietary APIs doesn’t catch the same tripwires, as you can easily go to Android or Windows phones if you so desire, or go to using a PC if you don’t like that on your desktop.
Back then though, it was Microsoft or nothing. Incidentally, I took a course in 2002 about internet economics, and one of the contentions of the professor was that Microsoft deliberately under-priced Windows in that era to avoid monopoly scrutiny, under the theory that the OS was equally important as the hardware, and MS had a de-facto monopoly and could have set a really high price as a result of their software being so vital. But they priced it at like $100 or so, instead of the $1000 they could have charged.
The answer is a bit complex. From Wiki
So it depends on when you got it. I never paid for Navigator, but it could have come with my ISP software release, which was pre-1996. Now the ISP probably paid, of course, and you’d pay if you bought it on physical media.
Once IE came out Windows computers were preloaded with it, and part of the case was that Microsoft strongly discouraged OEMs from loading Netscape on computers sold to consumers.
The Win10 laptop I just bought had neither Chrome nor Mozilla loaded, but downloading today is a lot easier than it was back then so even unskilled users can do it.