Starting sometime in the 1990s, the U.S. government, plus the European Union, aggressively took antitrust action against Microsoft. “We must act,” said the smart ones in government. “If we don’t, Microsoft will get too big, and control too much.”
What a difference a few technological revolutions make. Last week, Microsoft rolled out a new version of its Windows operating system, and America yawned. Fewer than half of the people surveyed by Gallup knew that the company was coming out with a new version of Windows,and only a third of those–which in turn is 17 percent of all people surveyed–saw any benefit to it.
The world has changed a lot since 1999, when Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that Microsoft is a monopolist.
For one thing, computers as we knew them then have become much less relevant. We’ve gone from desktop computers to laptop computers to smart phones to tablets.
Thanks in large measure to the wildly popularly iPhone–a shirt-pocket computer that, oh yeah, also makes phone calls–Apple, not Microsoft, is the largest company in the world. Microsoft is a bit player in the phone market, and its new tablet is (at least now) no iPad killer. Even its share of operating systems in the home market has declined, as iPhone customers buy Macs.
In the words of USA Today, “Microsoft felt it had to gamble on a radical redesign” of its flagship product. That’s what competition does to a company–even an alleged monopolist. Consumers have benefited more from competition than they ever have from antitrust cops.