Microsoft was a monopoly with 98% of the OS market who was trying to use that monopoly to force their competitors out of business.
Remind me again, what company am I supposed to believe is doing that today? Near 100% market share and uncompetitive practices?
This comic seems like the opposite of http://xkcd.com/774/ - it's trendy to ignore the abuses of Microsoft in the 90s, or to paint some false equivalency that allows you to just ignore stuff.
Let's see, are there any important markets out there today where a company has a monopoly? Well, there's the tablet market I guess, where Apple has 95% marketshare. But that's merely a $40 billion a year business with a 70% year over year growth rate so it's not really worth considering, right?
And as we all know Apple would never use strong arm tactics like excessive patent litigation to try to hamstring its competitors. And thank goodness that they promote an open platform where anyone can run whatever software they want.
Edit: the 95% figure is a bit out of date, however Apple's revenue marketshare in tablets still remains quite high (around 90% in 2011 and even in 2012).
Edit #2: For reference, when Standard Oil was brought to court on anti-trust charges they had a 70% market share. And US Steel in its heydey only controlled 2/3 of the market.
Also, even if it was 95%, there are clearly competitors with momentum, and you could probably argue that the tablet market isn't really distinct from the smartphone market. But really, it seems like it's way less than 95%. No monopoly.
> But really, it seems like it's way less than 95%. No monopoly.
Although there are no hard and fast rules, to be considered a Monopoly in the UK, for example, you only need to have a minimum 25% market share.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
That seems like a strange definition. I guess both Apple and Google have monopolies in the tablet market, then, by the UK definition. Although that obviously seems contradictory.
I'm going by the typical colloquial definition (which might be closer to the real definition outside the UK), that a monopoly is when there's basically just one option and that market dominance can be used to harm competitors and consumers.
25% market share isn't 'the definition' of a monopoly in the UK, as far as I'm aware (IANAL or in any way an expert in this).
It's one of the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for the OFT to refer a merger to the Competition Commission for investigation under the Enterprise Act[1], if the result would have greater than 25% market share. The other main conditions being that it believes the result would be "a lessening of competition", that it's an important market, etc. That doesn't suddenly make every company with >25% market share a monopoly.
The nearest I can find for the definition of a monopoly, for the purposes of investigating a company on its own (rather than a merger) is "a dominant position in a market"[2], the wording imported from Article 102 TFEU[3].
Amazon has credibly claimed that the Kindle Fire has 20% market share. The Nook also has some not insignificant share. Even adding up the also-rans will probably get 3-5 more percent.
This is important because there is an inflection point where you are not allowed to use your monopoly in other markets -- that might be at 95%, but probably not at 75%.
I am making no judgement on their practices -- just correcting market share and when they may or may not be within the law.
I'd say that both Apple and Google both have monopolies over app sales within their ecosystems. And at least one of them seems to be abusing this monopoly power.
Agreed, and the bundling of a web browser wasn't the problem, it was the symptom. The problem was that one company had (at the time) near monopolistic power over the mainstream technology revolution. The problem was that Internet Explorer was bundled to combat the idea of Netscape becoming a platform to distribute network applications.
(And you have to give Microsoft credit for taking the threat seriously, because many people would have dismissed the notion in the 1990s. Today there is no doubt. The open platform created by web browsers has already inflicted the greatest damage to Windows' dominance, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.)
Apple is a monopoly with 100% of the iOS market and use that monopoly to shut any potential competitor out of the market. Can you buy ebooks from Amazon from Kindle app? No. Can you have a true Firefox browser on iOS? No. Can you buy apps directly from developers? No.
What ever Microsoft did in 90s, is nowhere near as bad as Apple today.
iOS is a product FROM Apple. They have the right to do whatever they want with it - same for Amazon and the Kindle.
Microsoft didn't "have a monopoly on Internet Explorer" - they had (still have?) a monopoly on COMPUTER OSes, which they used to force-feed everyone with a BROWSER. It would be a monopoly if Apple's iOS ran in 90% of the phones in the world, but that's not the case today (nor in the foreseeable future)...
I don't see much difference between how "Microsoft force feed everyone with a browser" and the way apple does, only that Apple is worse.
iOS is not a product(you can't buy it separately, can you?), it's a platform that many developers make a living on. When I am saying iOS market, I am actually saying iOS software market.
Given Windows ran in 999% of the computers at the time, whatever they distributed was "force feeding". That included bundling the browser and selling Office for highly discounted prices (basically killing the competition). I'm somewhat of a libertarian on that front - I don't think governments should "interfere" for the most part - but I do see the reasoning behind what they decided here
As for iOS, you don't HAVE to buy an iphone today. NO ONE is forcing you to develop on it. In fact, less than 1/3 of the smartphone owners do have one - And THAT's the distinction: choice. Argueing "it's the same thing" puts you on the same boat as that chinese clone manufacturer that sued Apple because they "didn't license their OS for anyone": it's THEIR product, they do whatever they want with it.
As for iOS being a product on itself, you're right - it's just the software that powers Apple's hardware, not an "isolated" product. Same as Kindle OS, WebOS or Bada, not the same as Android and Symbian, which are sold/licensed to third parties...
But same as your reasoning, you didn't have to buy windows either, there were still 1% (maybe more) computers that runs other OSes. By the way, I agreed with you, government should not interfere as long as MS didn't shut competitors out of the platform.
Now, I bought iPhone/iPad because they are the best hardware with some of the best software. I don't REALLY have other choices if I want the same build quality. I don't have a problem that Apple bundles apps for free, I do have a problem when Apple stops me from running software that I really want to have running on my device. Just because he can control everything running on the hardware doesn't mean he can do whatever he wants. Again, whatever this thing should be called, it is far far worse than MS's "monopoly".
This reaction seems a bit too simplistic for me. Assuming that market share + competitive-niceties is the only issue to be evaluated for fairness within capitalism is a rather short-sighted view in the current technology world.
In the 90s (relative to now), Microsoft's scenario involved very specific and identifiable things on which to evaluate the market from an anti-trust point of view. It wasn't just things like 98% of the OS market or browser bundling; these were very concrete things that any person could look at and visibly see. In a fast-growing market without a lot of players, it was easy to see that MSFT was largely the only game in town.
Nowadays it is much more complex. Who cares about OS installations anymore (besides MS Windows division?) Back in the 90s, categories such as search weren't yet a critical part of the mainstream. What about personal data (social networks) or advertising (display/text)? Consider a more granular scenario: when Twitter or Facebook makes an API policy change that forces third-parties who have built upon their API into wholesale business changes, is that anti-competitive? The "low switching costs" that service providers mention isn't quite so cut-and-dried.
It seems to me we could use some evolved thinking on the subject. Continuing to apply the simple metrics used with the MSFT anti-trust evaluation feels outdated.
The only reason Apple has such a big share in tablets is cause they were the ones that got one out there that didn't suck first.
Same with Microsoft. Windows 95 kicked all others asses cause they MADE the PC business. Just like Apple did with tablets and iphones. iphones have since gotten saturated with other products, tablets soon to follow. Just like the computer business in the 90s.
So what exactly constitutes a "market"? And what is the magic "share" below which we should stop worrying? Comcast and AT&T have less than 50% of internet provider market in US, but even that causes all kinds of problems.
I was thinking mainly about software companies, as per the examples given in the XKCD hover text. Physical service providers like ISPs are a bit trickier to consider, as it is possible for a company with only 1% of the national market share to be a monopoly in a particular region. That's the problem with ISPs, local monopolies in some places.
If I didn't overlook something it only states something about hardware market shares. Which are much easier to measure than software market share. (Although even in the hw market shares there might be a significant uncertainty due to DYI built computers which were quite common during the 90s.)
By the mid to late 90s, I don't think DIY computers would have made much of a dent compared to prebuilt computers, especially since most of them would have ended up running Windows.
I wasn't able to find web usage stats that are very old. http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/os_marketshar... is the oldest usage-based data I could find, which puts Windows up at around 97% in 2005. I can't imagine it was much lower in the late 90s, given that Macs of that era were pretty shitty and even less people used Linux back then.
During this time I still went to school and half of my friends had self-build computers. The other half had computer from very small shops.
And this was also a time when none-Linux Unixes were still still popular, so I would expect some share from them. Linux got a lot of momentum around '98. (Yes, and Macs existed too.) Moreover there was OS/2, BeOS, Irix and whatever... Linux however lost a lot of momentum in the early 2000s when people realized it sucks as a Desktop OS for non-geeks.
90% is well possible I think, but 98%? Never ever.
Well, I linked to some data showing it up around 97%-98%. If you think OS/2, BeOS, Irix, or something else was making a significant dent in the late 90s OS market, then... well, frankly I don't know what to say to something so ridiculous.
As far as I understand, the problem with MS was that they tried and used their strength in the OS market to gain an advantage in the browser market. What similar cross-market unfair competition are Facebook, Google and Apple blamed for?
They have a local monopoly on their hardware. It's like cable companies: there may be several of them in a country but if there's only one in each city, they have a local monopoly that they can abuse.
My third-party iOS browser uses its own renderer and they don't seem to have issues with it. However, it is designed for niche cases and does not implement the full W3C spec., so I guess that is what they really have issues with?
Here is an older example. Apple used to use the popularity of their iPod to get people to use iTunes to buy music. They were very aggressive at preventing people from making compatible drivers. People would try to do so to make the iPod compatible with Linux only to have Apple slightly change the protocol every month with a new iPod OS release.
Wasn't Google accused of forcing Motorola/Verizon to dump SkyHook in favor of their own solution by holding Android hostage? I am not sure what the result was but it seems one could say that's anti-competitive behavior (if the accusations are true) but it probably didn't matter because they didn't have a monopoly at the time.
Depends who you ask. Milton Friedman argued that capitalism cannot be seperated from freedom as
"[e]conomic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society. On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom." [1]
On the other hand, Karl Marx saw capitalism as dividing society into the haves and have nots - the haves being the bourgouise with all the wealth, and the have nots being the proleteriat who had none of the wealth. Marx, obviously, was not a fan.
The XKCD strip is about whether or not it's a good thing to have tech companies with overwhelming amounts of power in certain areas. That's orthogonal to whether or not such behavior is strictly legal.
It's funny, because the anti-trust lawsuit revolved entirely around the browser wars and "bundling". However, that law is rather vague bordering on poorly written (many instances of "bundling" are often a benefit to the customer) and was likely misinterpreted besides. Moreover, Microsoft won the browser war as much on releasing an outright better browser in a key time frame when Netscape was having extreme development trouble. Even without the bundling Netscape was at a huge disadvantage.
More so, the truly anti-competitive behavior of Microsoft (where they effectively bribed OEMs to prevent them using other OSes) didn't receive nearly as much attention.
There was an antitrust lawsuit from Be about the OEM shit, but it was settled out of court for only $23 million without MS admitting any wrongdoing http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/84708/Microsoft_Be_re... likely because Be was near dead by that point.
I remember thinking that was strange. How do you settle an antitrust lawsuit out of court? Ask every consumer ever to agree that 10c is fair for having been prevented from having the option of saying "No OS or GPL OS please, I'll sort it out myself when I get home"? I don't recall getting one red cent, even though I was sold hardware through several vendors who had been bribed to not offer me options. While I'm sure many consumers would still have said "No, I need things installed" I can also see many saying "Nah, I'm not forking up for an OS, I'll run GPL" or "Nah, I'll... No. (pirated CD at the ready back home)".
By the same token, half the crap on a fresh install nowadays doesn't really benefit either although it's hard to say which direction the money is flowing, I suppose if they're charging me less for installing McAffee/ton of ISPs/etc whatever, I'll opt in and remove them. But I still don't have the option or anything..
Why does everyone think this is about Apple? It's possible the comic is referring to Google's monopoly of web searches.
My guess would be he's criticizing "monopoly as dangerous" accusations in general as silly since Microsoft has fallen so far. But that's kind of a poor argument since Microsoft was punished for monopolistic practices, both de jure and de facto.
This really isn't XKCD's best comic and it's not even funny.
The "alt" text reads: Facebook, Apple, and Google all got away with their monopolist power grabs because they don't have any 'S's in their names for critics to snarkily replace with '$'s.
At the time it made sense to go after Microsoft for bundling because the PC was the only gateway to the internet. Now almost every device has access to the internet, so its a much even playing field.
the discussion here is weird. isn't this obviously about the across-the-board practice of bundling browsers with OSes, which is the rule in mobile OS and is culminating in Chrome OS?
Microsoft was a monopoly with 98% of the OS market who was trying to use that monopoly to force their competitors out of business.
Remind me again, what company am I supposed to believe is doing that today? Near 100% market share and uncompetitive practices?
This comic seems like the opposite of http://xkcd.com/774/ - it's trendy to ignore the abuses of Microsoft in the 90s, or to paint some false equivalency that allows you to just ignore stuff.