Was Microsoft a monopoly in the 1990s?

megaprogman said:

I just literally wrote some software to work and I probably violated some patents doing so. However, I don't care because the chances of whoever is offended finding out is next to nil. Software is going to get written with or without patents because in general enforcement sucks, largely because its very hard to know how software was written without getting to the source code.

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If you write the software probably nobody would care. If a company like Apple did it, and tried to market it, since they would be able to compete against Microsoft, they would be noticed and a lawsuit would happen.

Heck, look at linux, there are likely many patent violations in that project, but it keeps happening anyway. It may not seem logical to you, but there you go. Also, this has nothing to do with microsoft's position in the late 90s.

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It's not worth it to sue them because they have such a small market share. And besides, all you say is "likely," not that there are patent violations.

Ultimately though, since you seem to know nothing about what actually happened, I suggest you educate yourself beyond lew rockwell and mises and look at the real world before you bring up issues you don't understand.

peace out.

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Or you could, you know, respond to their claims rather than just writing them off. That's usually how debates work.

phattonez said:

Or you could, you know, respond to their claims rather than just writing them off. That's usually how debates work.

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I have responded to claims. However, if the conversation does not move on when it is revealed that those claims are bogus, the only thing left to do is dismiss them.

megaprogman said:

I have responded to claims. However, if the conversation does not move on when it is revealed that those claims are bogus, the only thing left to do is dismiss them.

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You didn't respond to them! I provided a quote and links and all you said was that obviously companies were prevented from entering the market, but you don't even try to substantiate the claim. And there were many more issues in the link and the quotes that went completely unanswered. Don't say that you revealed those claims to be bogus when you didn't even look at them.

phattonez said:

You didn't respond to them! I provided a quote and links and all you said was that obviously companies were prevented from entering the market, but you don't even try to substantiate the claim. And there were many more issues in the link and the quotes that went completely unanswered. Don't say that you revealed those claims to be bogus when you didn't even look at them.

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The first link is irrelevent because it does not address the software market specifically and each market has its own quirks and traits.

The second link does not mention patents.

There was nothing there to refute :shrug:

phattonez said:

Then Microsoft, by this method, still has a monopoly of Internet Explorer. Trade Secrets are not a problem, as secrets tend not to stay secrets very long.

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No, I don't think it was the browser market monopoly that was the issue, they didn't have the market at first anyway.
It was that they have the operating system monopoly, which is far larger/broader, AND that they used the OS monopoly to stifle competition in the browser market. You can be king, just don't abuse the kingdom...so to say.

But isn't borrowing their code, learning the lessons from it, and using it yourself also a crime?

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Depends on what you signed with them, or what you did to obtain the source code, and what you used the source code for.

A ton of people did this with Netscape though since they didn't want to use Internet Explorer.

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Exactly. Nestscape was doing great. Then, based on what I can gather, the Juggernaut stepped in and:
Netscape's web browser was once dominant in terms of usage share, but lost most of that share to Internet Explorer during the first browser war. By the end of 2006, the usage share of Netscape browsers had fallen, from over 90% in the mid 1990s, to less than 1%.

It was pretty startling, I mean, MS basically duplicated netscape, and started just giving it away with their OS.