What was the actual impact of Microsoft anti trust case on the industry?
What projects were affected - stopped existing or the opposite, could grow.
How was the atmosphere at Microsoft at the time? How normal devs were affected?
What implications it had on other companies?
In general, what changed after threat of break up
How big topic that was? Did people outside IT even know about it?
I think the main effect was that the industry was assured that no matter how big the talk was, or how elaborate the ritual was, antitrust would never be seriously applied to software.
Without the DOJ lawsuit, 3 things off the top of my mind:
Apple would not exist.
Google would not have android as part as their Berhshire Hathaway-esque portfolio of technologies/companies. They'd have still beaten Microsoft in the search engine business.
Somebody would have killed Bill Gates or at least tried to, like it has happened with many POTUS. The person who is perceived as #1 will get all sorts of lunatics after them. (You could argue that is a safety system that nature installed in humans in order to avoid one person to monopolize decisionmaking) . Kinda like a more severe and irrevocable DOJ.
It's pretty hard to speculate with any certainty, but I suspect companies like Amazon and Google would have had much more difficulty growing if Microsoft had more power to control their access to Windows users. In the same way that Google and Apple made it difficult to block ads on mobile or sideload apps without using the App/Play stores, MSFT would have found a way to get bigger slices of the Amazon retail and Google search pies.
The biggest thing is that FAANG learned to avoid Microsoft's mistakes, up to a point, and for example a bunch of them have policies where they destroy documents after a certain period plus they train employees to not put stuff in writing.
It will be much harder to prove something against them because proof will be gone.
Not much. People seemed to have forgotten that Bill Gates encouraged many shady business practices at the expense of innovation, was a serial purjurer (felony) and monopolist, and presently feel that Gates, a college dropout, is somehow an expert in communicable diseases and pandemics.
-- it was known outside of tech - for me & I think others it taught us who microsoft was - they notoriously didn't do interviews or spend a lot of time on press - back then it was clear M$ was focused on the business & apple was focused on products - Steve was out there community building but Bill really wasn't - generally people didn't trust microsoft a great deal at the time - so it didn't come as a surprise - but the trial really showed us who Bill was at that time & what was going on at M$ - suspicions for those us totally outside of the "tech scene" but still using tech were certainly confirmed - the second thing was people became a lot less flagrant about trying to obviously dominate a whole stack --
Practically speaking it had little effect, but as a college student in CS during the trial it helped to solidify a very negative impression of Microsoft. The cool technologies at the time were not coming out of Redmond. UNIX/Linux, Java, and web technologies were the hot things to learn. It took a long time for Microsoft to try to earn back the trust of developers.
David Boies got an undeserved reputation out of it as the killer cross-examination lawyer. People used to do the "Jaws" theme when he approached the witness stand. I think Gates made it too easy for him.
Since then, he completely soiled himself with Theranos and trying to intimidate the whistleblowers and the press.
As a user the most immediate effect was having to deal with the stupid browser selection screen.
I suspect it did have a cooling effect on some of Microsoft's more egregious business practices for quite a while, but that's a case of making things not happen that otherwise would have, which is impossible to quantify.
>> In general, what changed after threat of break up
Howard Hughes' approach to tax evasion resurfaced.
I believe I have testimony PDF from two or three of the major witness' .. "knife the baby" included.. many of those documents said things in public that had never been confirmed, regarding cozy business aka monopoly practice with Dell, Intuit and others.. maybe they are on the web but might be hard to find at first...
I think Gates has mentioned it distracted the company from other work on product innovations at the time.
All Microsoft were ultimately trying to do was to insert their business model on to the web. Chances are that without the anti trust case, right now the web would have a lot more areas with an enterprise sales cycle rather than the self-serve sales that is prevalent now.
End of Bill Gates in the driver's seat, for better or for worse.
Does anyone even know what changed in Windows? I can't recall a version of windows where IE was not available.
This is from the Wikipedia [1] article:
> Bundling them is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft's victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of IE
I kinda wonder about statute of limitations but I do think that Microsoft should probably sue the United States government at this point because it has since been proven without a doubt that bundling IE did not present an unfair advantage in the browser wars [2] that eventually lead to Chrome easily overtaking all other browsers.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#/media/File:Brows...
