![]() "There's a general sense that the four companies testifying have unique power in the tech industry, a position that Microsoft held 20 years ago but probably doesn't have today," Michael Carrier, a Rutgers Law School professor and antitrust expert, said.Īnd yet, Microsoft's "dominance remains significant" in the PC market with the Windows operating system, and enjoys a similarly dominant position in productivity thanks to Office, according to Andrew Gavil, a Howard University School of Law professor who co-wrote a book on Microsoft's antitrust cases. In other words, experts suggest, Microsoft is no longer seen in the market as an unstoppable superpower. Even the Xbox One game console is lagging behind Sony's PlayStation 4. In the time since then, however, Microsoft has seen plenty of new challenges - notably, the emergence of Amazon Web Services as the market-leading cloud platform, even as Microsoft abandoned its smartphone ambitions as Apple and Google came to rule the market. Microsoft faced its own antitrust battle more than two decades ago, when the company was accused of anticompetitive moves including bundling Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system. Microsoft remains a major force in the enterprise software market, and competitor Slack recently accused Microsoft of anticompetitive tactics. ![]() Microsoft declined to comment on the hearing. "Microsoft today under Satya Nadella, has become a 'kinder, gentler Microsoft,'" referring to the company's willingness to work with competitors. "Microsoft was known as 'The Evil Empire' in the 1990s and had the big antitrust suit against them related to bundling Internet Explorer with Windows," Jaluria said. Davidson analyst Rishi Jaluria said Microsoft's reputation has changed significantly since the days of its own antitrust scrutiny. ![]() With the Slack complaint being "one big exception," D.A. Microsoft is the second-most valuable tech company in the world (behind only Apple), has a dominant position in the enterprise software market, and just this month was the subject of a complaint in the European Union from competitor Slack about anticompetitive practices, the sort of thing on which Wednesday's hearings were to focus.īut antitrust experts told Business Insider that the company's absence from the hearing had less to do with the company's business practices, and more to do with Microsoft's ability to fly under the radar when it comes to the scrutiny that's followed its competitors for the last several years.
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