Despite the widespread perception that the antitrust investigation was ineffective, if you trace back to the beginnings of Microsoft's stagnation, you will find it happens exactly when they started getting sued for antitrust in the US and Europe, and similarly so too did their innovation stall. They kept on producing cool stuff out of their research labs but nearly none of it ever made it out. Regulatory concerns enormously biased them towards playing it safe, just doing incremental improvements and milking their cash cow instead of risking aggressively entering new markets and getting hauled into court for it. Even the rise of OSX can be traced to it as MS has been forced to license a great deal of technology (exchange, office formats, etc) to its most hated competitors under FRAND type terms.
So its kind of interesting that regulation may actually have been effective, just very slow to work, and also it is unclear whether it was in the ultimate interests of consumers or not (eg: years of stalled innovation that we are only now catching up on).
> if you trace back to the beginnings of Microsoft's stagnation, you will find it happens exactly when they started getting sued for antitrust in the US and Europe, and similarly so too did their innovation stall.
Or, when they managed to effectively kill Netscape and BeOS, having essentially zero competition.
> They kept on producing cool stuff out of their research labs but nearly none of it ever made it out.
The stuff out of their research labs never made it out before that either.
> Regulatory concerns enormously biased them towards playing it safe, just doing incremental improvements and milking their cash cow instead of risking aggressively entering new markets and getting hauled into court for it.
Huh? Was there any point in time after, say, 1987, when they did not play it safe? what does regulation have to do with it?
> Even the rise of OSX can be traced to it as MS has been forced to license a great deal of technology (exchange, office formats, etc) to its most hated competitors under FRAND type terms.
Samba was bundled with OS/X before MS was forced to open the protocol (which was actually extended from an older Digital protocol). The only other protocol which might have been at all relevant is ActiveSync, but it wasn't a factor in the rise of OS/X. It might have contributed to the iPhone, but I'm not sure of that either.
> So its kind of interesting that regulation may actually have been effective, just very slow to work, and also it is unclear whether it was in the ultimate interests of consumers or not (eg: years of stalled innovation that we are only now catching up on).
Excuse me for the question; in all seriousness - are you a Microsoft employee?
Are you seriously claiming that Microsoft's failure to and delay in implement standards for web and office documents is somehow related to regulation? Because from where I'm standing, it sure looks like "it's good to be the king, we don't need to do anything" stalling.
The rhetoric in this post is ridiculous, especially when you cherry-pick interpretations of his commentary, castigate him for your interpretation, and question his personal affiliations.
If your best interpretation of "innovation" is "web standards," it is clear that we have VERY different perspectives on modern computing.
It is completely devoid of any data - just assertions that are completely false in the world I live in.
> If your best interpretation of "innovation" is "web standards," it is clear that we have VERY different perspectives on modern computing.
Well, in HN the standard topic of "MS stalling" is IE, so I assumed that.
> Please consider the tone of your posting.
Yes, it was a bit aggressive. I've been on HN since the time when a demand for facts or at the very least items that could be discussed (rather than vague notions) was the norm. Most people on this site had joined recently, and think this is a reddit/fox news "everyone's opinion carries the same weight". I don't; I think If you want to advance a position, you have to give some support. Non was given.
Let's start again. Do you think the claims in the post I replied to have any merit? I don't. Do you have any examples we can discuss, since you clearly disagree the ones I brought up are relevant?
Despite the widespread perception that the antitrust investigation was ineffective, if you trace back to the beginnings of Microsoft's stagnation, you will find it happens exactly when they started getting sued for antitrust in the US and Europe, and similarly so too did their innovation stall. They kept on producing cool stuff out of their research labs but nearly none of it ever made it out. Regulatory concerns enormously biased them towards playing it safe, just doing incremental improvements and milking their cash cow instead of risking aggressively entering new markets and getting hauled into court for it. Even the rise of OSX can be traced to it as MS has been forced to license a great deal of technology (exchange, office formats, etc) to its most hated competitors under FRAND type terms.
So its kind of interesting that regulation may actually have been effective, just very slow to work, and also it is unclear whether it was in the ultimate interests of consumers or not (eg: years of stalled innovation that we are only now catching up on).