1. There's an interesting blind spot among business strategists and antitrust enforcers vis-a-vis monopoly power. This piece by @benedictevans on how Microsoft 'lost' its monopoly power to Google is a good case in point. What did Microsoft really lose? ben-evans.com/benedictevans/…
2. It's certainly true that Google is a large and powerful corporation. But does it follow that Windows/Office is unimportant? These programs are on billions of devices and brought in tens of billions of revenue to Microsoft last year.
3. Windows and Office are basically thirty year old commodity products by this point, and yet Microsoft still has massive rent extraction from those. Sure Microsoft is not dominant in adtech or search and it's not cool like Google. But... so what?
4. Moreover, these are very important products, and according to some software analysts, Windows is increasingly unsafe. Which is basically another way of hiking prices in a particularly destructive manner. mattstoller.substack.com/p/does-microso…
5. Between 1999-2014 Microsoft disclosed 225 security vulnerabilities a year. After they reduced testing the number of vulnerabilities has increased to 627 per year in the 5 years since. And this product is in billions of devices.
So... we still have a problem.
So... we still have a problem.
