How is this different from Google leveraging their virtual monopoly on search to develop and give away the free Chrome browser?
In fact Netscape Navigator was developed until 2008, the year Google started giving away Chrome for free. How do we know it wasn’t actually Google that killed the Netscape Navigator product by doing this?
What about all the poor companies that would like to make a profit from developing and selling web browsers but can’t because of Google giving away Chrome? At least with IE you had to buy Windows, either directly or indirectly. With Chrome you don’t have to buy anything.
I’m not sure I buy that. IE was better than the competition before regulators turned their eyes towards Microsoft. IMO what killed Netscape was Navigator 4.x. That was such an enormous pile of trash it sent people screaming into the arms of Internet Explorer.
Seriously, I remember using it. Netscape 4.x was utter, absolute garbage. Stability was a joke, it’s early CSS support was a minefield of potential crashes, and you couldn’t even resize the browser window without it re-loading the page. and since back then a lot of us were still on dial-up, that was a big deal. And if you were running it on any Linux/Unix variant, you’d have to spend hours on hacks just to get the font rendering to not suck.
then when they tried to resurrect the Netscape brand by releasing a not-ready-for-prime-time alpha of Mozilla, they sealed its fate.
They certainly do now. IIRC there was a lot of talk in the early days about how Silicon Valley and the rest of the burgeoning PC / IT / Internet industry simply ignored Washington and all the traditional politics, lobbyists, etc.
Eventually they got bit & got involved in the Washington scene just like every other mature industry.
What I don’t recall now, and am not interested enough to research is just when that sea change occurred. I would not be surprised to learn that DoJ attacking Microsoft over IE was in fact the catalyst for the industry to recognize that what happens in DC affects life in Redmond & Santa Clara.
They all figured out that you didn’t make money from a browser, you make money by monetizing use of the browser. I’ve been using Mozilla for years - until I found that on my new Win 10 machine Mozilla decided that google.com was not a safe site to visit. (Probably having something to do with their deal with Yahoo.) So I switched to Chrome. Which I see from my Google Analytic results is the favorite browser used to visit my site.
But I agree with bump about profits. I can’t recall reading anywhere that Netscape hurt them as things played out.
Because the cost of switching a search engine is effectively zero. It is also very cheap to switch browsers. Google search works just as well on IE (or Edge or whatever) as it does on Chrome, and Bing works just as well on Chrome as it does on IE.
Having a near-monopoly is perfectly fine. What is not allowed is using a monopoly in one product to acquire a monopoly in another where you would not otherwise be able to acquire it through the quality of your product.
In an era when Google search is so pervasive that “Google” a verb, there is a gigantic potential cost – to the affected businesses – of customers switching search engines, or the slightest twitch in Google’s search algorithm and rankings.
This is why no other online company has been subject to more forceful claims of being an essential facility or the “gateway” to the Internet.
If it was wrong for Microsoft to use their Windows “monopoly” to merely give away a free browser, why isn’t it wrong for Google to use the gigantic revenues from their search monopoly to try and acquire a smartphone monopoly?
This is the exact point raised by the OP. Since a different browser is a mouse click away, what was the big deal about Microsoft bundling IE with Windows?
because back then it wasn’t. In the Windows 9x days dial-up was still prevalent. Downloading a new browser would take some time. You could get Netscape on CD at places like CompUSA for some money.
The point is that you don’t ***HAVE ***to use Google to use your machine. It’s not essential. You can have a perfectly cromulent computer that connects to the internet and never uses a search engine.
You pretty much HAVE to have Windows, and back in those days, Linux was even less relevant for desktop computing than today, and Apple hadn’t yet come out with low-cost desktops.
So by leveraging the ONE single thing that effectively anyone who wants to use a computer had to have in order to use it, Microsoft was leveraging that monopoly power. It’s about the ability to avoid it, not about how “important” it is.
I had a grad school prof who pointed out that it’s theorized that the ONLY reason that Windows has always been so cheap is that Microsoft is scrupulously avoiding accusations of monopolization by pricing it low and NOT taking advantage of that unavoidability of needing to use Windows. They could have charged $500 or more per install, and people would have paid- what else could you use (really, what else can you reasonably use now?).
So by bundling the browser in with the operating system and coming up with rather bullshitty claims of it being “integrated”, they were effectively giving Netscape the business version of a prison rape, as people then had the choice of a pre-existing, no-cost browser vs. one you had to pay for and go out and download. Not much choice there for commercial users (the lion’s share of PC users even now).
The counter argument is Google search is not absolutely essential, people just like using it. IOW there’s a difference between something being convenient and familiar vs it being essential.
But that is like Windows was in 1995. You did not absolutely have to have it, and there were other good options (see below).
You did not have to have Windows in 1995 (when the antitrust suit was raging) – I used OS/2 Warp for many things. I also had a Mac which worked fine.
Many fellow OS/2 Warp users told me it was so superior to Windows and they were so happy with it, they would never, ever use Windows under any conditions.
IOW like Google is doing to Microsoft today by leveraging the gigantic revenues from their search monopoly to give away free Google Docs word processing and spreadsheet software. It looks like they are “trying to cut off Microsoft’s air supply”, which was originally said by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison about how to disadvantage a competitor.
All that in the context of knowing that the vast majority of purchasers never modified the default settings most of them for fear of “breaking” their computers. It’s leveraging their market power.
It’s the same reason software or online service providers have been pressured to change the default settings of their software by the FTC or by consumer advocates when the default setting is either disadvantageous to competition, to consumers, or violates consumer expectations or assumptions.
The cliche is “buyer beware,” but buyer beware is not the base assumption of antitrust law or consumer protection law.
Sure, but I’m pretty sure that the utility of the alternative options is a major factor; Warp was pretty cool (I ran it from about 1993-1995, until Windows 95 came out), but the installed user base and application base was probably even smaller than Linux’s is now. And on top of that, you had all that red box/blue box business with the windows emulator, and all the headache of trying to get Warp to work with TCP/IP over an ethernet LAN. Definitely not for the technically faint of heart.
The cost of NOT using Google is essentially typing in something like “www.bing.com” and then setting your browser to use that as your new default. And… in other countries, Google is NOT necessarily the dominant search engine- look up Baidu, Naver or Yandex, for examples.
The fundamental difference between Google giving away Google Docs and Microsoft giving away IE is that nobody’s forcing you to use Google, and Google isn’t automatically installing Google Docs when you go to www.google.com. As essentially the only (serious) OS game in town, and bundling IE with Windows, Microsoft was doing something very different than what Google is doing.
Your argument was it’s wrong for a company with a dominant market position to use that as leverage and via predatory pricing undercut competitors – like Microsoft allegedly did with Netscape (or did Google ultimately finish off Netscape Navigator by giving away Chrome)?
Regardless, that is exactly what Google is doing with Microsoft – using their dominate market share in search and resulting ad revenue to give away free word processing and spreadsheet software which Microsoft charges money for. Google is clearly the dominate world power in search. Annual Google ad revenue from search is about $70 billion. Microsoft only makes about $1 billion from Bing search revenue.
Also, how is bundling IE with Windows different than when Microsoft started bundling networking with Windows? PC operating systems used to not have networking and various companies like 3COM, Banyan Systems, Novell, IBM, etc. provided this. Was bundling networking with Windows equally wrong as bundling IE, and if so why wasn’t that prosecuted. Should all Windows versions today be non-networked, and users have to purchase a separate 3rd party networking package? That way 3COM, Novell and Banyan might still be in business.
First, it’s not about predatory pricing or market dominance, it’s about monopoly power. Different things. Google’s dominance in search engines doesn’t give them any particular leverage to outcompete Microsoft in the productivity app space, any more than Microsoft’s dominance in the productivity app space gives them any special leverage in the search engine space.
Second, a networking stack is arguably a legitimate part of an operating system, just like a disk defragmenter, a file system checker and a memory manager, all of which are examples of things that used to be third-party and Microsoft rolled into their operating systems. In other words, the market for those tools was solely because Microsoft had developed a shitty OS in the first place. Killing the third-party tools wasn’t monopolistic so much as decent design. Browsers, on the other hand, aren’t part of the OS- they’re an application.
It’s like if say… your water utility had cruddy water, and you had to buy water filters. Then, suddenly your water utility starts processing it better, removing the need for filters . Did they take advantage of their monopoly position to run the water filter makers out of business in your locality, or just do their jobs better? That’s essentially what building a TCP/IP stack into the OS is.
Eh, he’s got a pretty good point there actually. Why is a defrag utility “part of an operating system” while a browser is not? Especially since the browser was required to perform system updates.