There is some nuance here. Microsoft executed "commoditize your complement" to perfection - the complements to their OS being PC hardware and applications.
This meant they had to be insanely good at supporting a vast array of diverse hardware, but also offered exceptionally good support for developers to keep the barriers of entry low in the Windows software market. They had even a cute name for these commoditized and neutered competitors - "ISVs". Basically, Microsoft owned the OS and the major applications like office & enterprise software, media, browser etc. and everything else was supplied by an ISV, for example your accounting software for country XYZ, a market where MS had no interest in entering.
As long as you kept within the ISV playground, MS was developer friendly, but it would turn very hostile to any perceived competitor to their core assets. Undocumented APIs, monopoly abuse, dark patterns, the entire circus. This strategy made the PC market impenetrable for nearly two decades, and it was only through sheer luck and complacency that the mobile revolution caught them on the wrong foot.
I wish we could have open platforms that competitive players can extend and develop without owning outright and excluding other competitors.
It's the great next step in regulating monopolies, contemporary products no longer exist standalone in the marketplace but must always interoperate with existing infrastructure and platforms. The last decades of tech competition were a repetition of this basic tune, some first mover more or less stumbling into a de-facto standard and then fighting like hell to maintain its dominance and undeserved rent extraction.
The situation is complicated by the nature of international trade vs local regulations, it might not be good for your national consumers to be fleeced by a platform monopoly, but you more than make up for it if your national tech champions achieve world-dominance.
> The last decades of tech competition were a repetition of this basic tune, some first mover more or less stumbling into a de-facto standard and then fighting like hell to maintain its dominance and undeserved rent extraction.
The development costs for Windows (as a common platform, stripped of any add-on that could be provided by other competitive players) are a footnote in the costs of the global software market for Windows. There is indeed a complex problem to be solved of how to organize an open platform so that the development costs are paid, but it's not fundamentally a question of resources. Multiple companies and open source teams have achieved roughly similar feats with many orders of magnitude less resources than what MS rent-extracted from the Windows OS consumers.
Ditto for hardware, you need a well defined and stable interface and the vendors will adhere to it once there is critical mass.
> Isn't that true for every industry?
In almost every such historic example that still exists in some fashion today (railways, energy, telco, utilities etc.), there was strong regulatory action to break up monopolies accompanied by rigorous standardization of the common interfaces.
I don't have a problem with competitive players inventing industries and new ways of doing things for the allure of monopoly profit. Just with the sluggish regulatory action in the particular case of computing tech, well past the point where it has become an established and essential resource for society.
> The development costs for Windows (as a common platform, stripped of any add-on that could be provided by other competitive players) are a footnote in the costs of the global software market for Windows. There is indeed a complex problem to be solved of how to organize an open platform so that the development costs are paid, but it's not fundamentally a question of resources. Multiple companies and open source teams have achieved roughly similar feats with many orders of magnitude less resources than what MS rent-extracted from the Windows OS consumers.
I was talking about Windows Phone, a mobile operating system. To have an open platform, you have to have one big company paying and managing its development. Otherwise you end up with fragmentation, lack of ABI stability, backwards incompatibilities and "distros" like with Linux on the desktop, and that is not exactly a consumer success.
If you want an open platform, you have Android. But apart Huawei (which was forced by US government) and maybe some few small manufacturers from China, I don't see much competition in the space.
Contrast this with a parallel world in which we have Android, iOS, Windows Phone, WebOS, Bada, Tizen, Maemo, BlackBerry etc.
This meant they had to be insanely good at supporting a vast array of diverse hardware, but also offered exceptionally good support for developers to keep the barriers of entry low in the Windows software market. They had even a cute name for these commoditized and neutered competitors - "ISVs". Basically, Microsoft owned the OS and the major applications like office & enterprise software, media, browser etc. and everything else was supplied by an ISV, for example your accounting software for country XYZ, a market where MS had no interest in entering.
As long as you kept within the ISV playground, MS was developer friendly, but it would turn very hostile to any perceived competitor to their core assets. Undocumented APIs, monopoly abuse, dark patterns, the entire circus. This strategy made the PC market impenetrable for nearly two decades, and it was only through sheer luck and complacency that the mobile revolution caught them on the wrong foot.