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by sverhagen 578 days ago
Wouldn't Microsoft be scared to suffer the same faith, if this were to really happen?
2 comments

Microsoft doesn't want Google to control the codebase Edge is based on and doesn't want anyone to counter the MSFT + OpenAI partnership, and the DOJ is trying to hand them their wishes. Hopefully the judge rejects this overreach and rules on lawsuit scope.
preferable would be preventing google+anthropic but also breaking up ms + openai
Doubt that’s on the table unless Microsoft is also sued. Without a joint ruling this wouldn’t be balanced
Doesn't mean we

a) can't hope

b) shouldn't hope

Ideally the feds would stay out of it and let the market do its thing.
As someone who remembers a time before Google, no.

Letting "the market do its thing" only works until a few companies accumulate enough power to monopolize the market.

The last two decades have seen being the next Google transformed into being acquired by Google, which has been to the detriment of everyone.

I remember the time before google. We were all stuck IE with no competitive browsers and everyone was using Windows machines. Now we have three browsers and multiple platforms. I just bought a Chromebook plus, that can run linux apps but is easy enough for my kid to use. My wife uses windows laptop and I use a mac. We have Amazon Echos through out the house. We have 4 major players in the tech space instead of one. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
Netscape? IE didn't become dominant until 2000+.

And those four players are more of a cartel than competitors, having agreed to mostly stay out of each other's ways.

The primary overlapping markets between them are consumptive devices and cloud services -- which I presume they're all in because they consider it strategically important enough to their other businesses to incinerate money.

The status quo is bad for Microsoft, anything with the potential to shake it up is worth doing. And they'd get a head start.