all tech companies do some shady stuff. look how apple sought to bury Adobe because Jobs felt slighted, manufacturers having to install nets to stop factory workers from committing suicide, evading hundreds of billions in paying taxes through Irish tax evasion. Stopping competitors from getting products to market through questionable patents and an army of lawyers. Uber making false calls mess with Lyft's operations. Google approaching Facebook to fix wages, bullying suppliers while suppliers took it for hopes of future business only to find Google built up their own works, and their sitting on Apple's board while secretly developing their own is questionable at best.
I would bet that the skeletons in the closets of these tech companies are far more darker then what we find out about. i guess the short point is, usually the same people who point(ed) at the evils of microsft praise other companies who have done far worse.
No, not all tech companies do illegal things. It's a false equivalence.
* Chinese manufacturers aren't really "Silicon Valley tech companies" and workers there committing suicide has more to do with Chinese culture and poor work practices than technology.
* Keeping money in Ireland is not a crime. The government set up really dumb tax laws, and companies responded rationally to them.
* Patents suck, but again, it's a government issue. The government sets up patent laws, and you have to abide by them. Some companies are more abusive about this than others, but they all have to follow the law.
* Uber making false calls was unethical, and possibly a crime. Uber does suck as a company but not all tech companies are Uber.
* Google didn't approach Facebook to fix wages. Steve Jobs did that. It was illegal and the government fined everyone involved quite a bit of money (although probably not as much as they should have).
* "Google" doesn't sit on Apple's board. Some people from Google used to sit on Apple's board. If there is a conflict of interest they are supposed to resign, and that's exactly what happened when Google started competing with Apple's iPhone.
* Google doesn't bully suppliers, Apple does that (sometimes). Google doesn't manufacture Android phones, they get other companies to do that for them. Yes, even that Nexus phones.
* Microsoft was convicted by the Department of Justice of anticompetitive practices. If I remember correctly there were felony charges. If you don't understand how seriously unethical they were in the 80s and 90s, you haven't been paying attention at all.
It was over IE as well, OMG they included a browser. Laughable now days, right? I used Netscape at the time and never had any issues installing or running it, even when IE hit 95% of the market.
Um, wow, ok. Look, you also have to consider the information that was revealed during the discovery phase of the lawsuit, not just what the DoJ decided to actually pursue.
Oh, and there has been more than one lawsuit to keep up with. A lot more than one lawsuit:
It's really hard to describe the full impact of what it was like to have everyone in the industry working under the constant fear of getting targeted by Microsoft for more than a decade, and the way that this shaped the market and technology as a whole. Summing it up as "LOL they bundled a browser" betrays a really massive ignorance.
Kids on HN don't understand what it was like when Microsoft was the only software company in town with a future. Kind of like Standard Oil back in the Rockefeller days.
Apple was dying, Google and Facebook didn't exist, Netscape had its "air supply" cut off and Borland, Delphi, and IBM looked like they were headed for the trash can of history. It's like trying to explain the Soviet Union to someone who was born in the 1990s. It just seems like a bunch of old men with bad haircuts, how scary could that possibly be?
I remember the conversations people had back then. You had basically 3 business models if you were going to run a software company. It was something like:
1. Stay so small/niche that Microsoft won't notice or care about you.
2. Avoid selling software as your primary source of income. This is basically a variant of #1.
3. Try to get bought by Microsoft. Ha, just kidding! Everybody knows that Microsoft doesn't buy stuff that's 'Not Innovated Here'.
3. Gamble. Hope you corner your market and extract as much value as possible from that market before Microsoft figures out what you're doing and enters your market. Or (later) C&D's you over some patents they have.
The weird thing is that outside the Bay Area (in some parts of Canada, at least), I still see startups recruiting for a #1-like business model, more-or-less: "The best $SOCIAL_MEDIA iPhone app in $CITY" or whatever. They're not actually afraid of Microsoft anymore, but it's like the mentality didn't go away.
Laughable. MS was terrified of competition so they always went after competitors. The only reason it was MS instead of IBM is IBM was scared of more government regulation on their business.
Apple could have easily had this market and more if they'd opened up.
Maybe you didn't work as a developer in the 80s. I used Borland, Watcom and many other vendors along with many other OSes as well. Magically in the mid 1990s you could even run something called Linux on your PC.
I would bet that the skeletons in the closets of these tech companies are far more darker then what we find out about. i guess the short point is, usually the same people who point(ed) at the evils of microsft praise other companies who have done far worse.