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I guess I've never read these emails before. I was a child when these emails were released, so I really wasn't following these events in real time.

I'm blown away at how openly they discuss being anti-competitive. When I think about a company being monopolistic, I usually envision market and environmental pressures that culminate in actions that can be broadly identified as anti-competitive. I don't typically envision leaders sending emails to each other on how to best be cartoonish villainous monopolists. And I guess it's strange that there was a time that it was considered even feasible that Windows could corner the whole web. Then seeing "embrace and extend" literally quoted in the email feels like some bad hit piece on Microsoft.

Developers my age grew up with multiple OSes with web capability. When I graduated, Chrome OS just came out, Android, iOS, and OS X were all widely used. Most of my career Microsoft has... "embraced" FOSS. Just some thoughts from a different perspective.




The old groklaw.net site has a lot of interesting historical context that came out of the lawsuits.

http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107... among others, as a lot of the other stories had microsoft involvement.


This was, I think, before it had really sunk in that emails were available in discovery.


yeah, in addition, a lot of younger people see Gates as some sort of savior given his philanthropy. I think a lot of older people in the tech industry see it as Gates trying to buy his way into heaven.




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