Remember ten and fifteen years ago? When people were wondering if Microsoft would eventually control the entire online world?
Back when the left was pondering siccing the government’s anti-trust machinery onto them (even more than they did)? And the conservative among us urged caution, because the market would inexorably level the field if it were allowed to?
We, as usual, seem to have been proven right again.
Sometimes the market gets some help. From the NYT story about Microsoft’s decision, in 1997, when Apple was almost out of business, to invest $150 million and keep producing Apple compatible software (thus saving the Apple):
“Microsoft can now fend off antitrust charges by pointing out that Apple’s continued existence will prevent Microsoft from acting as a monopolist. If Apple dies, Microsoft will appear nakedly monopolistic, the only major producer of operating systems for personal computers”
Absent the threat of the anti-trust lawsuit, Microsoft might very well have let Apple go under. More here:
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/microsoft-and-apple-the-history-casey-mulligan-doesnt-know?
The intervention re Apple was part of it, to be sure.
As re Google and its many spinoffs, Facebook, Amazon, et al? Not so much.
BTW, I would have let Apple die off. Jobs certainly had it in him to keep revolutionizing things without need for the Apple logo. As a NeXT owner, I’d have liked to have seen what he could have done in an alternate situation.
1. I will settle for “part”.
2. Your probably right about Google. Because there was no software to install just a web page, it would have been difficult for Microsoft to kill them off. Their advantage was building in default software options.
3. But would Jobs have been as good if the various Apple employees had scattered to the four corners of the wind? Without Apple as a going concern, I don’t think Jobs would have been able to hold on to enough talent. He had more than the logo. He had 30 plus years of institutional memory and personal networks.