[7952]

What is reassuring is that these companies where unable to make anything become completely dominant forever. We tend to obsess over one part of the stack for a few years and forget the necessity of other parts. Another part of the stack will reassert itself and allow someone to challenge dominance. For example, html5 replacing flash is heavily driven by mobile browsers which depended on an evolution in hardware (touch) for them to become prominent. Yet Microsoft pushed silverlight.

[dredmorbius]

Even without becoming perpetually dominant, many of them exercised a huge amount of control over a large area for a long time. IBM from the 1930s through the 1990s, Microsoft from the 1980s through the 2010s, AT&T from the 1910s through the 1980s, etc.

There are cases to be made for these reigns being useful: AT&T spawned Unix and (in part) TCP/IP and the Internet, IBM spawned much IC development, Microsoft proliferated cheap and standardized x86 CPUs. But each also quashed competition in the form of both other firms and competing technologies: AT&T, despite the role UNIX came to play in packet-switched networks, explicitly rejected them for its own network recognizing that this would undermine its own dedicated-circuit switching. Microsoft's treatment of competitors is legion, but it's IBM we have to thank for the term "FUD".