We can thank Washington as a whole , the Democratics and Republicans alike for letting Google, Amazon, Walmart monopolize to the point of running our lives , with out us having any say so, these monopolies should have never happened, period. Let’s not forget Facebook as well. These types of monopolies absolutely destroy the American Dream for us.
Actually, in a true market driven world, Washington should not need to intervene in a "Free Market", I like less regulation and don't expect the Gov't to "Protect" me as a consumer. if you think about it- the "open market" somehow has failed us. Consumers have been duped and now the FAANG runs the western world. Some of the M/A actions I have failed to understand how they were allowed.
For example, Facebook should never have been allowed to buy up Whatsapp and Instagram.
Not sure how to describe it or who is to blame- IE: $$ Barrier to entry, VC obstruction, VC Collusion in Menlo Park?, etc... the entire system is flawed to have so much concentrated wealth and power in IT in one geographic area and it simply didn't work. Stanford University funded Google's development.
The entire situation is very complex a mixture of business failures, technology changes, market acceptance, US Gov't acceptance as a standard like MS Products on GSA schedule, etc.
This game plan goes back to past sins of Microsoft (Netscape et al) continually squashing small innovative companies who built and like the chinese- simply copying and stealing their ideas and adding them for free, then their PR states they "invented" the feature. Historically in my 1982 until now view is 3rd parties always had better add-on's than MS ever did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator
"The business demise of Netscape was a central premise of
Microsoft's antitrust trial, wherein the Court ruled that
Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with the
Windows operating system was a
monopolistic and illegal business practice. The decision came too late for Netscape, however, as Internet Explorer had by then become the dominant web browser in Windows."
Listen to Bill, arrogant and smirking:
The MS Office products used to have competiton from the beginning- now they own the PC market. Going way back to Visicalc- Lotus (before Excel), Dbase and other DB products before MS Access, All sorts of word processors like Wordperfect had decent market share- but all have virtually have disappeared. Borland who did some huge marketing and had decent products did not survive either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3
The Wiki Article does not a reason for demise to include "other" information like purposely preventing 3rd party applications from functioning well and non-cooperation with necessary support from Microsoft allowing compatibility of 3rd party products.
Google licensed it's technology from Stanford University and got paid.
https://www.redorbit.com/news/education/318480/stanford_earns_336_million_off_google_stock/
Yet.. Google itself was start-up funded by US taxpayers and the National Science foundation.
https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660
Stanford is supposed to be Non-Profit- though it is funded by the Stanford Management 24 billion dollar fund, obviously for tax purposes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University
