>> IBM and Microsoft weren't dethroned until roughly a decade later, so it's a real stretch to claim any kind of causal relationship.
> Microsoft, strictly speaking, still hasn't been dethroned, it's just the market in which it has its monopoly has itself become less important in the grand scheme of things.
This is literally my next sentence?
> OTOH, it became less important because of other markets to which the government action prevented it from extending it's monopoly, which pretty clearly shows the relevance of the government action.
Smartphones? Somebody should tell Nokia. The only one whose actions prevented them extending their monopoly to that area was Steve Ballmer. (Or Steve Jobs — six of one Steve, half a dozen of the other).
> Likewise, the IBM antitrust action is what created the boom in independent comouter software and services businesses, which directly led to IBM being dethroned because software commoditized the computers running it.
Patently absurd. IBM's fate was sealed a few months after the start of the suit, when Digital introduced its PDP-11 minicomputer, and over the next 13 years, along with others, e.g. Seymour Cray at the high end, proceeded to disprove the DoJ's case in real time, taking huge amounts of market share away from IBM's mainframes the old-fashioned way, by offering a superior product at a (much) lower price. It was on Digital's machines, not mainframes, that software publishing (such as ...AT&T's Unix) first became a major industry.
Al Gore's representations about the internet weren't really all that bad by politician standards, but to claim John Mitchell[1] invented software development is a new one.
Around the time the DoJ dropped its case against IBM, they committed accidental suicide when they released the PC, with someone else's (Intel 8088) proprietary chips and, even more egregiously, someone else's proprietary operating system (DOS, by you-guessed-it), which enabled everyone and their brother to make their own, cut-price copies, and, adding insult to injury, giving their erstwhile chip and OS vendors gazillion-dollar licensing bonanzas that IBM never saw a penny of.
This was IBM's own dumb idea, not John Mitchell's.
I think you're confusing an absolute hermetic market monopoly with anti-trust law.
Anti-trust law doesn't require a total monopoly. It requires evidence of monopolistic practices which adversely affect consumers and customers.
If you're negotiating, it's not a monopoly. If you're negotiating with a gorilla you can't afford to anger, or if you're being told what to buy and when and not negotiating at all, it's a monopoly.
IBM, AT&T, MS all showed clear evidence of anti-trust breaches.
The PDP-11 proves the point. DEC's PDP series was marketed as a Programmed Data Processor and not a Computer because the IBM had a lock on computer sales and rentals. Upper management in most of America would never authorise a computer purchase from anyone other than IBM.
Marketing the series as a PDP meant technicians, scientists, and engineers could buy a computer through a side-channel that bypassed the usual corporate acquisition process.
This wouldn't have been necessary if no lockdown existed.
RCA, Honeywell, and others all tried to break into the computer market directly. Only CDC succeeded, and that was only because Cray gave CDC a lead in HPC that IBM couldn't match.
For bread and butter corporate computing, IBM really did own the market.
> Microsoft, strictly speaking, still hasn't been dethroned, it's just the market in which it has its monopoly has itself become less important in the grand scheme of things.
This is literally my next sentence?
> OTOH, it became less important because of other markets to which the government action prevented it from extending it's monopoly, which pretty clearly shows the relevance of the government action.
Smartphones? Somebody should tell Nokia. The only one whose actions prevented them extending their monopoly to that area was Steve Ballmer. (Or Steve Jobs — six of one Steve, half a dozen of the other).
> Likewise, the IBM antitrust action is what created the boom in independent comouter software and services businesses, which directly led to IBM being dethroned because software commoditized the computers running it.
Patently absurd. IBM's fate was sealed a few months after the start of the suit, when Digital introduced its PDP-11 minicomputer, and over the next 13 years, along with others, e.g. Seymour Cray at the high end, proceeded to disprove the DoJ's case in real time, taking huge amounts of market share away from IBM's mainframes the old-fashioned way, by offering a superior product at a (much) lower price. It was on Digital's machines, not mainframes, that software publishing (such as ...AT&T's Unix) first became a major industry.
Al Gore's representations about the internet weren't really all that bad by politician standards, but to claim John Mitchell[1] invented software development is a new one.
Around the time the DoJ dropped its case against IBM, they committed accidental suicide when they released the PC, with someone else's (Intel 8088) proprietary chips and, even more egregiously, someone else's proprietary operating system (DOS, by you-guessed-it), which enabled everyone and their brother to make their own, cut-price copies, and, adding insult to injury, giving their erstwhile chip and OS vendors gazillion-dollar licensing bonanzas that IBM never saw a penny of.
This was IBM's own dumb idea, not John Mitchell's.
—
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Mitchell