You can call a tail a leg and say a dog has five legs but it still only has four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it so.
Feel free to bash the quality of Microsoft’s products, I do it all of the time (in addition to being an econ nerd, I’m a computer engineering student). But I also know that they have no monopoly regardless of what some idiot judge thinks. Real monopolies do not last long in a competitive free market, and the computer industry is one of the freest and most unregulated in the world. If a monopoly (or for that matter, a cartel) exists indefinitely in a free market, then it has only done so by providing what consumers want better than any potential competitors. But as I said, most monopolies in a market economy only exist for a very short while before a competitor arrives. As MS already has competitors (Apple, Linux, etc.) on the desktop OS market. The very existence of successful competitors shows that MS is not a monopoly and has not infringed on anybody’s rights in anyway, thus the government should back off.
For a fact-based and historical view on this (rather than the economically illiterate garbage you usually hear in the mainstream and techno media), see this fine article on the equally fine Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Antitrust.html
Good article. It didn't tell me anything I did not already know though. As I said earlier, the LEGAL definition of monopoly and the economic definition of monopoly are two different things. The enabling legislation, as mentioned, was not explicit in describing what it was. As a result, the judiciary had to establish case law over the years to provide definitions. That is still going on.
As to competition proving that Microsoft was not a "monopoly", it was not too long ago that Apple had just 2% of the Desktop OS market. Linux was not even considered anything except a hobby toy on the desktop. There were a few other OSes such as THEOS, the remnants of Amiga OS, and the like, but combined, those did not account for even 1% and in enterprise far less. That left Microsoft in the position of having 96% of the overall desktop OS market and better than 98% of the enterprise desktop OS market. Only in the last year has that percentage of the overall market dropped below 90% as Apple approached 10% and Linux started to become relevant as a usable desktop OS.
Monopolies are not inherently illegal. It is what the holder of the monopoly does with it that determines whether they are using it to suppress competition.
Microsoft tied its secondary and tertiary products to its primary Windows OS by requiring that they MUST be included with Windows. They established self-serving contracts that required computer makers to pay for a Windows license for every computer they made regardless that some computers were shipped without OS under threat of having their OEM status pulled and their business essentially crippled. Predatory pricing is evidenced by Microsoft including its Internet Explorer with Windows at no charge when its primary competitor was selling Netscape Communicator browser for $30, effectively destroying Netscapes profits. Microsoft's refusal to allow competitors such as Wordperfect to have access to the new printing APIs built into the new Windows 95 which benefited Microsoft's Word but put Wordperfect and other vendors of Windows word processors at a severe competitive disadvantage where their printing ability—something that was extremely important to a word processor— was essentially crippled.
These "empirical" examples of monopolistic practices are what got Microsoft into trouble.
If it waddles, quacks, and has feathers, it's likely a duck.