11/19/2023 0 Comments App like possible financeHe viewed the government’s antitrust pursuit as an assault on his life’s work, colleagues said. He was Microsoft’s leader, deeply involved in company operations and especially its internet strategy. Gates was widely admired as a brilliant entrepreneur, polls showed. In 1995, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a website, called the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock, to track Mr. Gates’s stake in Microsoft soared to $100 billion. He was the world’s richest person, and during the course of the trial, as the stock market surged, Mr. The Microsoft case also had a huge personal dimension because of the stature of Mr. But its Big Tech peers - Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook) and even Microsoft - are all under scrutiny in the United States and abroad. It is an undisputed giant in search and online advertising, and its software and artificial intelligence prowess can extend to other industries. Today, Google does not loom as large as Microsoft once did. In 1996, it entered the media business in a partnership with NBC, setting up the cable channel, MSNBC, and a website, (Microsoft shed its stakes in both, years later).Įxecutives in industry after industry worried about what Microsoft might do next, sharing a sentiment expressed by Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp: “Everybody in the communications business is paranoid of Microsoft, including me.” Microsoft was rich, powerful and ambitious. If you wanted to get online, chances are you did it through a computer that ran Windows. The iPhone, which started the smartphone era, didn’t arrive until 2007. The first Blackberry, essentially an email device, was introduced in 1999. E-commerce was just getting underway, and every industry wanted to jump on the digital bandwagon. When the Microsoft trial started, it was the high tide of early internet euphoria. “We think there are aspects of the Microsoft case that are actually very helpful to us here,” Mr. Its deals with companies like Apple and Samsung to make Google the default search engine on their smartphones are legal and benefit consumers, giving them the best technology and reducing costs for device makers and their customers, he said. Google, on the other hand, has to work with and pay partners that make smartphones, browsers and other devices, Mr. Walker was deputy general counsel of Netscape, the commercial pioneer of internet browsing software, which was the main target of Microsoft’s campaign to hobble competition.Ībout 90 percent of personal computers used Microsoft’s Windows software, the main gateway to the young internet, and Microsoft controlled the software and services that were featured on those Windows PC screens. “Google deploys the same playbook,” the government declares, by illegally wielding its might in online search much as Microsoft did with its personal computer operating system, Windows.īut Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said there were big differences between the Microsoft of the dot-com boom and today’s Google. In its lawsuit against Google, the Justice Department points to the Microsoft case and that company’s tactics in the 1990s. An appeals court upheld most of that decision but was skeptical of the government’s preferred remedy - breaking up the company. Microsoft was found by a federal judge to have repeatedly violated the nation’s antitrust laws. Lawyers for the Justice Department and states who joined the lawsuit would mostly say the damning testimony spoke for itself. Microsoft representatives would say the government had presented isolated snippets of text, taken out of context, certainly not proof of anti-competitive conduct. Many days, there were spin sessions on the courthouse steps. Simpson trial and the Lindbergh kidnapping trial. It was a trial that often dealt with cerebral concepts like “network effects” and “switching costs.” Yet The Times gave it the kind of day-to-day coverage ordinarily reserved for very few courtroom dramas over the years, like the O.J.
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