> included unethical, anticompetitive and illegal

Oh, like Uber and AirBnb?

A little too much snark for my taste but this is fundamentally a good point. The same people who would rail against MS's rule-bending are very likely to be the same ones cheering on regulatory disobedience in startups, and frankly the latter's is often far more unambiguous.

Good food for thought there, thanks.

regulatory disobedience in startups is not the same thing as anti-competitive practices.

I don't know. Folks who suffered under MS in the 90s have a sour taste for anticompetitive behavior and criticise Uber/AirBnB.

The folks who know BillG as a malaria guy, or who cheered MS back then, are the ones who tolerate the ends by all means.

I don't see how is Uber unethical or anticompetitive. Refusing to play by the rules created by the taxi lobbies is not anticompetitive.

Maybe it's because I was born in 1990 and wasn't old enough at the time, but I can't understand how shipping IE with Windows lead to antitrust litigation. The closed systems that we're seeing on mobile seem much, much worse.

Reminds me of: http://xkcd.com/1118/

MS had a motto back in the day "embrace, extend, destroy" which was said to sum up their approach to standards and technologies they didn't control.

First MS would adopt the standard (embrace), then they'd start adding to it in ways which were useful but not available outside the MS products using the standard. Because they were so big their reach meant that these extensions would often become widely adopted and once this happened you effectively had to be running the appropriate MS software to have whatever it was work properly.

At which point the standard / technology ceased to be any threat to MS as while they may not control the paper standard, they controlled the vast majority of how it was being used in the real world.

The fear was that with IE being the defacto standard browser for 90% of machines, MS could have potentially take control of HTML and the other web standards and damaged or destroyed the open web.

I was born in 1983 and grew up outside the “tech bubble" during the Microsoft era and so I have a very consumer-oriented perspective about what was happening at the time. As a very young computer user I actually appreciated what Microsoft was doing by bundling everything I needed to use and build on the web (IE4, Outlook Express, FrontPage Express) with the OS that came seemingly "free" with any PC my parents bought me. The only other thing an “average” consumer really needed in those days was an AOL/dial-up account and the Office suite for school or work. These products along with the rise of Windows starting with Windows 95/98 led to Microsoft being the de facto technology company of the time. There was nobody as big as Microsoft. They were singular in their influence and scale.

You can try to argue the same against Apple and Google in the modern day but that argument would fail because Apple has arguably as much clout as Google which also arguably has as much clout as Microsoft these days. And when you throw in “pure” web service companies like Facebook, the pie gets even more sliced. So even though everyone now has a proprietary stack of apps bundled with their walled garden of devices and services the fact that there is more than one garden makes it a very different situation than what was happening in the late 90s where the only garden in technology was Microsoft's.

Side note: I don’t think it was entirely Microsoft’s fault Netscape went under. It was my impression that Netscape’s management and direction had a lot to do with their downfall. I still have bad memories of trying to use the monstrosity that was the Netscape Communicator 4 suite. At the end of the day, bundled or not, what Microsoft offered was better. Compliance be dammed.

Yeah, you didn't live through it. You don't remember when the world was windows-only; no tech company nowadays has anything like their dominance back then. You don't remember what a great product Netscape produced, how much better they made our lives, and how quickly they were destroyed by MS's dumping.

My understanding is that Netscape failed for a variety of reasons, a major reason being they decided to rewrite their entire product. Joel Spolsky cataloged it as one of the "Things you should never do".[1]

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

The counterfactual we don't know is "would they have survived anyway?" The deck was stacked against them before the self inflicted gunshot.

> but I can't understand how shipping IE with Windows lead to antitrust litigation.

It was a bit more than just shipping it with Windows. IE was built into the OS. It was hard to remove, and the rendering popped up in unexpected places. People would view their email in Outlook Express. The advice at the time was "you're safe from viruses if you don't open the email", but people didn't understand the the preview pane of OE was opening the email for them, and infecting their machine.

I agree that the closed systems we're seeing now are worse.

I hate all the lock-in that's happening at the moment.

The technology and 'integration' issues were mostly a side-show. The actual crime was forcing PC OEMs and ISPs to ship only Internet Explorer, which "cut off Netscape's air supply".

>Why are these only positive adjectives? You could have included unethical, anticompetitive and illegal just as well

Because those things were not as important to Microsoft's success as anti-ms people would like to think.

Well, now we'll never know.

What are you confused about?