Microsoft Should Not be Ignored

Daniel Hanley of Open Markets Institute writes about how Microsoft is leveraging a combination of monopoly power and data and should not be ignored as focus remains on behemoths like Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

Last week Microsoft’s President Brad Smith released a new book, Tools and Weapons. A major theme of the book is that Microsoft is no longer the apex predator it once was, and that it has learned its lesson about the need to be a responsible corporate citizen.

Smith says Microsoft needed to “look in the mirror” and acknowledge its past mistakes including how it acted prior to the events that culminated in its antitrust case in 2001 where Microsoft leveraged its monopoly in desktop operating systems to inhibit competition in the technology industry. He even goes so far to say that self-regulation alone won’t tame technology companies and calls for a greater role for government in keeping the industry from turning its tools into weapons.

The picture of a reformed Microsoft that Smith paints in his book is at least consistent with an image of the company many people now have, which is that it was asleep at the switch when mobile computing and social media came along and has now become a benign and fading legacy corporation. While alarm builds over the power and predation of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, observers use words like “lumbering,” “boring,” and “lost” to describe Microsoft.

Yet a closer look at Microsoft today shows that the corporation is anything but a benevolent citizen of the technology industry. Not only is it huge; Microsoft’s market capitalization exceeds that of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. Indeed, its over $1 trillion valuation makes it the world’s largest corporation.

To the extent that Microsoft lags behind Google, Amazon, and Facebook in leveraging a combination of monopoly power and data for predation, it is doing everything it can to catch up. This includes its recent purchase of LinkedIn, which gives it intimate insights into the lives of 645 million people, and the information it gleans from the 300 million monthly active global users for Skype.

Further, Microsoft continues to profit enormously from its monopoly in desktop operating systems where it has maintained a 70 percent market share since 1993. That dominance extends into a range of other markets. Microsoft has 20 percent market share for desktop search, 22 percent in public cloud infrastructure, 43 percent for office suites, and 45 percent in the video game console market. In all of these markets, Microsoft is either the largest or second-largest corporation.

Moreover, Microsoft is behaving in many ways just like the other technology giants. Google and Facebook have repeatedly been charged with copying their competitors’ designs or features, such as when Facebook adopted many Snapchat-like features, including Stories. Not to be outdone, Microsoft’s Teams software has also been accused of copying many features of Slack, which now subsequently has more users in three years than Slack has acquired in six.

Microsoft has also continued to expand the industry “kill-zone” deployed by Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, where investors will not provide needed seed capital to startups because they fear the new ventures will be acquired or squashed by the technology giants. Since 2004, Microsoft has gobbled up at least 138 companies.

Meanwhile, Wall Street finds Microsoft anything but boring and lumbering. A survey by The Wall Street Journal of stock analysts who cover the company shows the overwhelming majority recommending “buy.” Why is the Street so bullish on Microsoft? One example detailed on Investopedia is the allure of the corporation’s “competitive moat” in Windows and other cloud products. Microsoft is now so dominant in the cloud industry, former Oracle Chief Communications Officer Bob Evans recently penned a piece titled “How #1 Microsoft is Beating Amazon, Google And Everyone Else in the Cloud.”

Given these circumstances, why aren’t enforcement agencies bringing an antitrust case like they did in the 1990s? That case ended with a consent decree in which Microsoft agreed to share or license out many technologies embedded in Windows, and in so doing allowed competition to flourish. Both Facebook and Mozilla Firefox were founded in 2004. Apple released their iPod in 2001. Google went public in 2004 and also released Chrome in 2008 while Microsoft was still restrained. In his new book, Zucked, Roger McNamee says, “Without the Microsoft case, it is hard to imagine Google succeeding as it did.”

Instead of reassuring the public of the gentle nature and responsibility Microsoft now has, Smith’s book simply invites enforcers to turn their attention to Microsoft as soon as they’ve tamed Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.