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BITWASTES_COMPANY_MAN

                                          October 30, 2021


Does David Auerbach have a knack for seeing
things as his employer wants him to?


   "... the US vs Microsoft antitrust trial
   was at its peak in 1999-2000.  The suggested
   plan to split Microsoft into two monopolies,
   one for Windows and one for Office, wouldn't
   have helped, even if it had made it past the
   appellate court that overturned the intial
   judge's ruling.  The case was a bizzare
   political sideshow, which had only a minor
   impact on the tech industry.  It did ensure
   that future tech companies kept a far larger
   battery of lawyers and lobbyists close by."


   Then on p. 193:

   "Microsoft succeeded by slightly
   outperforming competitiors."


     Microsoft's big break was a somewhat mysterious
     overture from IBM, and sharp-dealing with IBM is
     how they got on top.  They stayed on top by         MICRO_SAGA
     living in a state of fear that someone else
     would pull of a similar trick against them,
     and a "partnership" with Microsoft was almost
     guaranteed to end up in court.

     The software industry did not live in a state of
     innocence before that "bizarre" antitrust case
     forced everyone to lawyer-up.


     The main way Microsoft "outpeformed it's
     competitors" was by changing it's (non-standard and
     unpublished) data formats at will, making every
     attempt at reverse engineering them at best
     a temporary success.
        
     Microsoft was typically on the other side of the    
     kind of reverse-engineering effort that Auerbach     
     was making while he was at Microsoft, attempting
     to reverse engineer Yahoo's Instant Messenger   
     formats to maintain interoperability.           
                               
          When faced with "monopoly", the legal
          system tends to reach for "break-up"      In Microsoft's heydey,
          because it's somethign that was done      it was pretty obvious
          before, (albeit only pre-Reagan).         that what was needed
                                                    was not "break-up", but
          With the information age comes a          published data-formats
          whole host of new problems, such          and APIs... but that's
          as the privacy concerns that              new territory for the law.
          Auerbach's *other* employer,              
          Google is constantly the focus of.
                       


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