ing. By the end of 1993, MS-DOS held a seventy nine percent market share, and with DOS clones grabbing sixteen percent the pc operating system was pretty much locked up; in fact, OS/2 (IBM’s OSS) had only four percent and Unix (AT&T’s source code powers this OSS) grabbed a dismal one percent share. (Akemann).Those numbers don’t lie, so in 1990 the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) began an investigation of the Microsoft Corporation (Cook). The main issues of the investigation were the allegedly anticompetitive OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) licensing agreements and the bundling of MSN (Microsoft Network) software with its OSS (Darrow). Chief among Microsoft’s detractors were other Internet service providers, such as America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy. They argued that as soon as Windows was loaded onto a computer that Microsoft had an unfair advantage. This is because the consumer could simply click a button to use MSN, whereas the purchaser would have to load the software for a competitor. I believe that this was an attempt to corner the market on Internet access, exactly as the other service providers claimed. This move eventually failed, however, due to poor interface, slow connection speeds, and inadequate technical support.The main concern with the OEM licensing, was the Per-Processor license that the locked the manufacturers into an arrangement that discouraged them from offering any other OSS on their computers. They worked by having the manufacturer pay a royalty to Microsoft on all computers shipped with a particular processor (Akemann). This gave the manufacturers a great price if they shipped computers preloaded only with Microsoft OSSs; and since they had to pay no matter what, it was unprofitable to use another company’s operating system. This, in my estimation, perpetuated Microsoft’s stranglehold on the personal computer OSS market.The FTC commissioners became deadlocked in a t...
