On May 18, 1998, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, seeking ultimately to break up the company. The case was controversial at the time and remains controversial now, but I would also argue the case is misunderstood today, and the Microsoft of today is not the Microsoft of the 1990s, and the Microsoft Antitrust Case of 1998 had something to do with that.
It’s popular to say today that the Microsoft antitrust case of 1998 was unnecessary and the market figured out how to handle Microsoft. But provisions in the settlement kept Microsoft from behaving toward Google the way they behaved toward Netscape and Lotus.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
