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Apple is the new Microsoft?

By Tung Yin

Back in the late 1990s, Microsoft was constantly pilloried by its Silicon Valley competitors (like Apple and Sun and Oracle) as some sort of monopolizing, evil Borg-like monstrosity that sought to assimilate or crush everyone else by leveraging its Windows platform.  Exhibit A was often Netscape, whose Navigator browser was essentially wiped out by Internet Explorer not because of any technological superiority of the latter, but its ubiquity.  I tended to think back then that the competitors were hardly paragons of virtue and that their complaints were perhaps driven in part by frustration that they themselves wanted to achieve Microsoft's dominance but couldn't.

Today, it looks like the government may think that Apple is behaving as badly as Apple once accused Microsoft of behaving.  Or, as Megan McCardle puts it:

There was a tendency at the time to moralize the characters in this drama--Microsoft was the Evil Empire, which sort of naturally made Apple and Netscape and Sun into the Rebel Alliance.  But as with so many revolutions, the rebels weren't really fighting against monopoly power; they just wanted to exercise that power themselves.

It does make you wonder what happened in the Star Wars universe after the events of "The Return of the Jedi."  I mean, it's easy to complain about the Empire's oppression and all that, but let's see Luke and Han and Leia actually run a galactic civilization . . . .

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on May 04, 2010 (boomark / email).