[raganwald]

> I am simplifying things a little

An important simplification you omitted: Microsoft used illegal monopolistic tactics to become ubiquitous. Do not skimp on the word "illegal" when thinking about this. We are not talking about one company being better managers than the other, we are talking about one company breaking laws that were designed to give the marketplace a say in the outcome.

Another thing was that Microsoft used many tactics for achieving ubiquity that may have been legal, may have been brilliant management moves, but the outcome did not reflect the marketplace choosing their products freely.

For example, they routinely imposed a clause in their contracts that hardware vendors had to license Windows for each CPU they shipped whether their customers wanted Windows or not. The net result was that any competitive OS would by necessity cost more than Windows because the customer had to pay for the competition and for Windows.

This created the illusion that Windows was more price competitive and that customers preferred the more affordable OS, when in reality customers had very little opportunity to make an informed choice based on true cost.

Apple made many choices that hurt them, but I really think we must be careful to make explanations as simple as possible---but no simpler.

[RyanMcGreal]

>Microsoft used illegal monopolistic tactics to become ubiquitous.

No. Microsoft used sound business practice (with a generous serving of good luck and timing) to become ubiquitous. Only then did they exploit that ubiquity through illegal monopolistic practices.

[dejb]

I'd go further than this an say that Microsoft actually became ubiquitous by facilitating an open and compatible hardware ecosystem. One that prevented a monopoly from occurring in the computer hardware market. Without an MSDOS, IBM and probably Apple would have duked it out for dominance with closed boxes full of mutually incompatible hardware. Prices would be a lot higher as the competition amongst hardware (RAM, Hard Drives, motherboards graphics cards, etc) makers would be limited to 'getting the contract from IBM or Apple' as opposed to pleasing consumers and/or a large range of OEMS.

... and then they exploited that ubiquity through illegal monopolistic practices.

[josefresco]

Wouldn't you need to already be somewhat ubiquitous in order to use monopolistic tactics?

[raganwald]

INAL, but if jibber-jabber from the chattering classes on the Internet is any guide, the big no-no is using dominance in one market to achieve or protect dominance in another in certain ways.

For example, if you have made a good business bet and beat AppleDOS by riding the PC wave with MS-DOS, that's fine. But if you use your MS-DOS dominance to beat Wordperfect, Lotus, Ashton-Tate and so forth simultaneously to establish Microsoft Office, that's bad.

Another example is the whole Internet Explorer vs. Netscape imbroglio. That wasn't a problem because Netscape couldn't make money selling browsers, it was a problem because it allowed Microsoft to try to make ActiveX a standard for active content in web pages, which would have closed the web to only work for Windows-based browsers.

[akshat]

I think in the Wordperfect biography by the ex-CEO clearly shows that they had faltered in their execution. They just did not have the same vision which Microsoft had. Each of these above mentioned companies were behemoths in their own fields with Microsoft being the "david" to these "Goliaths". While I do not want to defend Microsoft's practices, to me their execution and vision just could not be matched by others.

[elblanco]

One thing that Microsoft is able to do, as a point of strategic vision, is to iterate their products slowly over years in search of the "good enough" quality for their products.

"Good enough" is that space where your product is suitably useful, maybe 80-90% useful, by the vast majority of people. Literally every person on the planet can purchase your product and get some kind of value out of it if not handle everything they need to do. Sure you get feature bloat because the intersection of what I do 80% and what you do 80% is not really that big, and you get quality control issues that you have to fix in later versions. But you cast a huge net and catch lots of fish that way even if some occasionally slip through the holes in the net.

Contrast this with Apple's "insanely great". You make a product, and polish it to a ridiculous shine. Sure you might alienate users who need it to do X when you've spent a great deal of time making sure it does Y better than anybody else, but the people that need to do Y will love you for all time. You may not cast a huge net, because instead of manufacturing lots of low quality net, you manufactured a small amount of very high quality net, but you catch fish that nobody else can get because they break through everybody else's net.

What happened with Word Perfect, by way of example, is that they just never bothered. They had their cash cow and figured they had locked in users because of their fancy keyboard shortcuts. They already had achieved "good enough" and didn't know how to compete against another vendors seeking that same quality. If Microsoft had been going for an Apple like "insanely great" quality, they would have made a completely different target. When Microsoft focused on perfecting Y, Word Perfect could have focused on X and Z and still made it. But instead, Microsoft did X Y and Z "good enough" that there really wasn't any difference between the products. And then Microsoft had a whole integrated suite of "good enoughs" and Word Perfect went quietly away.

[nitrogen]

There was also the problem of Microsoft changing important Windows APIs just before release. They obviously knew about their own changes, so they updated Word accordingly, while WordPerfect had to rewrite parts of their software after whatever version of Windows was released because the APIs didn't match the developer versions they were given by Microsoft.

Reference: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080317124445613 (search for "API documentation").

[pedalpete]

I believe what akshat may be referring to is that WordPerfect more than once opened the door for companies to replace WordPerfect with Microsoft Office because when WordPerfect created a new product, they ignored backward compatibility with their old versions.

[akshat]

Windows would have won even without this "extortion". They had played brilliantly with IBM in 1980's and realised the importance of GUI. Everything else which was "illegal" definitely helped their cause but none was enough to block the Windows juggernaut.

[statictype]

>Do not skimp on the word "illegal" when thinking about this.

Not trying to be snarky here, genuine question:

Did courts validate that Microsoft's business tactics were, infact illegal?

Maybe I'm talking about something else, but I recall Microsoft being let off the hook by the DOJ.

What they did was certainly sleazy but since you insist of the word 'illegal' here, I guess it's important to know if what they did was finally recognized as a violation of any laws.

[nitrogen]

The DOJ (Department of Justice) is part of the executive branch of the US government, while the courts are the judicial branch. The courts found Microsoft guilty of illegal behavior, but the DOJ did not fully pursue the penalties originally accepted by the court.