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Microsoft’s Market Power In The Late 90s Was Out Of This World
It was the most powerful company in tech
There’s a lot of monopoly investigations and allegations these days. But compared to Microsoft’s ability to crush its competitors back in the day, Google, Amazon, and Meta, while clearly monopolists, possess way less market power.
Today’s biggest tech firms all compete with each other — Google vs. Meta in digital ads, Amazon vs. Microsoft vs. Google in cloud, etc. Back in the 90s nobody competed with Microsoft in operating systems. Microsoft’s share of the operating system market was north of 90%.
Back then the operating system was everything. Operating systems for lack of a better word operate your computer and are the glue that binds the hardware and software of your computer. When you run an app on your laptop, it’s the operating system that helps the app launch, talk to the rest of the computer (such as the GPU or speakers), and get allocated the compute and memory resources that it needs to run. Without the OS, a computer would be just a useless brick.
Thus, owning the most dominant operating system (Windows) in the 1990s when personal computing was growing insanely fast was unsurprisingly an extremely lucrative and powerful position. All the applications were written for Windows. This meant…
