Organised crime has many (many) facets. One of the most unpleasant is the protection racket. The idea is that they send around some hoods to tell you that you have to pay them some money to keep your business from being ‘adversely affected’. This often means trashed. More often than not, the hoods are the very ones responsible for the ‘adverse affects’. One alternative is that, if you refuse, another crime syndicate sends their hoods around for a ‘chat’. You can figure out how this all works from here. For the crime syndicate, it’s money for nothing.

During the 1990s, Microsoft bore a striking appearance to a crime syndicate. The hapless victims were PC manufacturers and retailers. As Microsoft was getting going, they realised that their products were really pretty bad. To ‘encourage’ sales they visited PC manufacturers and retailers and explained the terms and conditions of DOS and then Windows sales, the Microsoft operating systems. It went like this:

“If you want our operating system (OS), you may not sell any of your PCs with any other OS.”

In the early days, DOS and Windows had (only) slightly more market share than the others. That meant that PC manufacturers and retailers had to make a choice. Accept Microsoft’s stand-over tactics, or loose the largest share of their business. Unsurprisingly, the PC manufacturers and retailers complied. Now you know why those other OSes suddenly disappeared in the early 1990’s and, for the longest time, shops have sold either Windows PCs or Macs, almost never both. Strictly speaking, Macs weren’t like the other PCs, and Microsoft wasn’t so concerned that the two might be in the same shop. Microsoft’s main focus was that generic PCs had one OS, and that OS was Windows. But there were certainly plenty of cases where Microsoft made it difficult to have computers with any other operating system in the shop.

What happened to the other operating systems (and other computer brands)? QD-DOS (essentially fully compatible with MS-DOS), Atari, Commodore, and most famously IBM’s OS/2. They went under. Microsoft coerced PC manufacturers and retailers with the threat of losing their license to include Windows on any of their PCs. Not to have done so would have been commercial suicide.

Once Microsoft discovered how effective this ‘policy’ was, they used it with other software. Internet Explorer is a great example. To hep Microsoft gain the dominant position in the web browser market, they forced PC manufacturers and retailers to include Internet Explorer on the Desktop of the computer (which was running Windows of course). That way, customers wouldn’t even think to see if Netscape Navigator (the arch-rival) was installed – they just used what they found first. Failure to do as Microsoft requested, lead to PC manufacturers and retailers losing their entire Windows license (if any ever did rebel against Microsoft). Nice.

Occasionally crime syndicates try to go straight - at least on the outside. They get involved in legitimate business here and there. But a leopard can’t easily change its spots, and Microsoft can’t easily adjust to open competition when it’s spent all of its life shielded by IBM (initially) and then by a protection racket until 2002 (when the US Government convicted it of breaking anti-trust laws). Since then has Microsoft grown significantly? No. It’s two main products, MS Office and MS Windows have not fared well. Windows XP went out for years with security measures turned off (massively inflaming virus issues) and Vista has failed to rejuvenate a flagging spirit among the PC industry. OpenOffice uses an open file format yet is mostly compatible to MS Office, and more and more people are being attracted to it. Faced with real competitors, like Google and Apple, who have developed against real competition, Microsoft is stuck. Nothing they do makes new money. How sad. They’re now experiencing the result of bullying the computer world for a generation. Now that the market is maturing, and people can see past Microsoft, people are choosing the better products that Microsoft can’t offer.