alt Hacker News>History is full of such examples. IBM thought nothing much of the software layer that ran their PC hardware layer and happily allowed Microsoft to own the OS market.
IBM didn't "happily" do anything of the sort. The company was undergoing multiple anti-trust investigations at the time and was trying to avoid incurring a large fine or even a structural remedy for creating a vertical monopoly.
The reason Microsoft went to the mat so hard when the government was trying to separate IE from Windows was Gates' fear that the company would end up being similarly crippled by the specter of anti-trust action from the government.
However many years later: the broad sentiment that MS needed to be broken up into separate Office, Windows, and Dev/Tools organizations was pretty on the money.
Document exchange, formats, and user editing experience have suffered due to their mixed goals and market control, this has real social cost. And with the current ‘copilot everywhere’ push we’re seeing pretty disruptive tech being hammered down a lot of throats. Mature Visual Studio features are being deprecated for subscription based off-site code gen… (which at a distance sounds like MS is struggling and needs extra development help to maintain its flagship development software, if only they had some kind of AI that could help them keep up…)
I dare say we’d be oodles better off with similar crippling fears in the board rooms of some media, energy, and tech conglomerates. The judge was right, and we missed a key chance to set a guiding example.