Steve said
He did whatever he could to make Microsoft as successful as possible and make his products successful and beat the competition. He leant on PC makers to include IE instead of Netscape. Isn’t that the logical thing to do? Strike deals, use your leverage, to beat the competition. Clearly I don’t know enough about the history of Microsoft or the law but the what I’ve read about the Netscape stuff doesn’t seem that bad.
The Netscape episode was all illegal. They were leveraging their monopoly in order to force you to use their other stuff by bundling the browser with the OS. You can’t do that. It’s illegal. You can’t bundle other products with your monopoly product (that everyone has to buy) in order to leverage your illegal monopoly to destroy the competition for other products.
He leaned on PC makers to include IE instead of Netscape. Isn’t that the logical thing to do? Strike deals, use your leverage, to beat the competition.
As Microsoft had a monopoly on the Windows OS, he could force computer makers to exclude Netscape and include the crap IE instead (which to this day is an inferior browser). How? Because they needed to have a low price on Windows in order to sell computers. Gates threatened to not sell them Windows OS’s or to sell them to them at a very high price if they included competing products. You can’t do that. You can’t say, “If you use my competitor’s products, I will fuck you and destroy you. If you use my competitor’s products, then we won’t allow you to carry any of our products, or we will charge you 5X as much for our products.” That is illegal. And this is what monopolists do.
All of Microsoft’s products were always inferior to the competition, but it never mattered since once you have an illegal monopoly, an inferior product can beat a superior product because you force everyone to use it.
Do you understand law at all? Do you understand US and international law regarding illegal monopolies? Do you understand why they are illegal? Because Microsoft was a monopoly, they were able to charge vastly higher prices for their products than if it were not a monopoly. Also their products hardly improved at all. Monopolies never improve their products because since everyone is forced to use them anyway, The only reason to improve a product is because the competition is threatening you. If you have a monopoly and everyone is forced to use your stuff, why would you waste money improving the product? All that money spent improving the product would be wasted since there is no reason to improve it.
Illegal monopolies are illegal under US law. They’re not fair. No one, but no one, but no one, can compete against an illegal monopoly. Why? Because an illegal monopoly makes it impossible for anyone to compete against them.
