Microsoft: An Interesting Case Study

Of Monopolies And Men

In addition to those aforementioned examples, the Corporate Microsoft had been receiving increasing criticism for their anti-competitive business practices. They had taken advantage of their early bundling agreements to help strengthen their stranglehold on the marketplace. They refused to allow vendors who wanted to bundle any Microsoft products with their systems to also bundle products from competitors. They used pricing pressures to help force OEM's to exclude any non-Windows operating systems from their configurations. They used the growing power to help force OEM's who bundled their Windows software to also bundle their Office software, again, at the exclusion of all others.

As they solidified their dominance, they used that "pacified" OEM market to force the adoption of their new Internet Explorer web browser, all at the expense of Netscape. In short order they were able to rise from a ZERO market share, to nearly 50%, and there was no stopping them at all. Netscape suddenly had to become a free product just to compete, but the damage was done, the infrastructure of exclusion in place and now Netscape is a mere blip on the browser radar.

In some ways, Microsoft is simply taking advantage of the misfortunes and missteps that other companies have and make. But in other ways, Microsoft has become greedy and gluttonous, using unfair and possibly illegal tactics to ensure domination in the marketplace. I guess one of the ironic parts is that Microsoft would still win the battle if it played fair. Their engineers and developers are some of the best in the business, and their marketing department has got to be a gold medal winner. Companies like Lotus, Ashton-Tate and Word Perfect would still have imploded on their own - it just may have taken a little bit longer.

IBM has a history of screwing things up. They invented the PC and are now barely even a tiny player in the market. When they bought Lotus, they had a winning suite on their hands, one that should have driven Microsoft into the ground. They had Lotus Notes, the premier groupware tool of its age. They had masses of cash and a dominant market presence. But they demonstrated yet again their own ineptness and did more to kill off their own software division than anything Microsoft could have possibly done.

Adobe has remained a big, slow-moving behemoth and slowly but surely, their market share has been eroding as more capable contenders have entered the picture. JASC, Inc. has an outstanding competitor in Paint Shop Pro, and HP is one of many companies that have chosen to write their own PostScript emulation rather than pay the excessive fees for licensing the true Adobe code. Microsoft Engineers released True Type fonts with Windows 3.1, and that font technology has quietly and fairly come to dominate the market for scalable font technology. Microsoft Publisher has risen to be a huge player in the small to moderate page layout market, and is another example of how fair competition and quality coding can put you right up there with the big guns. Let Quark and Adobe fight for position on the cliffs, Publisher will just keep on staking out the middle-ground and bask in the profitability of their modesty.