From the Editor’s Desk: Breathtaking (Premium)

Many, many years ago, I realized that my enthusiasm for personal technology had shifted from supporting products and services, or perhaps the companies that made them, to supporting the users of those products and services, or perhaps the customers of the companies that made them. That is, I’d been fascinating by personal technology since before we even used that term, I recall seeing my first Commodore home computer and imagining the games I would create for that device. But when I entered the industry, not by becoming a software developer as expected, but rather by becoming a writer of books, an author, my concerns shifted.

This realization wasn’t immediate. And it was confused by another contrary reality in which I slowly found myself supporting Microsoft and its products and services after having dismissed this company as ridiculous. Growing up, I was firmly in the Commodore and then Amiga camp, and my view of MS-DOS and Microsoft’s growing collection of software and languages in the 1980s was decidedly negative. It wasn’t until Microsoft delivered Windows 3.0 in 1990, decisively pointing the way forward for the entire industry, that my views about it started to soften. And when I saw a pre-release version of what became Office 4.0 in late 1993, the bit flipped. Microsoft had clearly turned some corner on quality and usefulness.

My first books were about programming languages, Windows, and Office apps, and while I never intended to focus on Microsoft explicitly–I mean, I did co-author a tome about Borland Delphi 3 in the late 1990s–I simply followed the industry. Even though I lived this history, it’s difficult to sometimes remember how dominant Microsoft was. But in those days, personal computing was Microsoft. And Microsoft was personal computing.

And it wasn’t until the company had established its dominance that I began to understand my role in this mess. Someone was complaining to me about some feature or behavior or whatever in some Microsoft product and I asked why they didn’t contact support and see what they could do about it. I had just done so with Novell. It owned WordPerfect at the time, and it was using a mysterious feature called the Registry that I had never heard of. This was in Windows 3.1, before it became more well-known–and more broadly used–in Windows 95 and later. Novell had been helpful in getting me over my Registry hump, and I had been able to get a lab of computers in the school I was working at properly configured.

But he was unconvinced. Microsoft would never fix the issue he was experiencing, he said.

You pay for this software, I argued, unknowingly taking my first steps into a Ralph Nader-like future. This relationship was all wrong, I said. You shouldn’t have to contort yourself to what Microsoft is doing, you’re the customer. It should do what you need.

That we would still be dealing with this type of thing 30 years later is ironic and sad. Indeed, this was a theme of a short talk I gave recently, though I had a lot more stories to tell, more examples of the abuses we put up with, and the often toxic nature of our relationships with personal computing products and services and the companies that make them. I was young and probably naive, and my views on this were simplistic. But the simplest ideas sometimes have a way of cutting through the noise and making difficult things easier to understand. Enshittification is like that. It’s an instantly understandable concept, and something you see everywhere–especially in personal computing–once you’re introduced to the term.

Enshittification is only a problem when you, as the customer, have no choice. That is, in a level playing field–a competitive market–you can simply move to a different product or service when the one you’re using doesn’t meet your needs or, in the most extreme examples, seems to be actively working against you. But the problem in our industry is obvious: A handful of dominant companies–we call them Big Tech, collectively–has replaced the one company, Microsoft, that dominated our industry in the 1990s and early 2000s. Each is horrible in its own way, and each is horrible in many ways, and because each has a monopoly or is dominant in specific markets, each has grown cancer-like into a monstrous misrepresentation of its original goals. Through means both legal and illegal, each eliminated competition, eliminated consumer choice, and used their respective dominance to prevent smaller, faster, and more innovative companies from making any inroads. When they see new markets emerge, markets that might harm their dominance, they leverage that dominance illegally to ensure that nothing changes.

This isn’t a new problem, and it’s not unique in any way to personal computing. Governments have long had regulatory agencies and antitrust laws aimed at reigning in abusive monopolists, and they can be effective counters to Big Tech when employed properly. This was the case with Microsoft in the late 1990s in the United States, and in Europe in the early 2000s. The resulting regulatory oversight is what triggered the personal computing industry that emerged in the wake of Microsoft’s dominance, one that was far more heterogeneous.

That diversity is good in the same way that all diversity is good, generally speaking. But we’ve now traded a single dominant and monolithic monopolist for several, and those companies–Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft–have all followed the same pattern we saw with Microsoft in the 1990s. As Corey Doctorow, the inventor of the term enshittification describes it, “Platforms are first good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”

Put more simply, at some point an abusive company and platform maker–it doesn’t have to be a monopolist per se, though the absence of effective competition is key to this behavior–will put its own interests over those of its customers, and the resulting changes in its products and services will negatively impact its customers, people or companies who pay it for whatever service. The relationship changes from healthy–an exchange of money for a valuable service–to toxic.

Netflix and Spotify have emerged as the obvious examples of this phenomenon for consumers. Both ostensibly have competition in the form of several other streaming services, but both are also dominant in their fields and unassailable. Both are useful in that they have ridicuously big collections of content and features that are objectively good. But both are also terrible. And while I’m sure there are people who are perfectly happy paying each or both $20-ish every month, there are many, many more who are troubled by how these once affordable and seemingly perfect services have devolved with janky user interfaces that ignore their wishes accompanied by all-too-frequent price hikes. Many can’t quite put their finger on the problem, but it’s simple. These companies have needs that don’t align with those of their customers. And they will do whatever they want, constantly probing to see how far they can push back against the people who pay them. To date, there appears to be no end to it: Both are still on solid growth trajectories. Most of us just put up with a lot of bullshit, and do nothing about it just like that Microsoft customer I spoke with 30 years ago.

This problem is exponentially worse with the biggest and most dominant companies, the Big Tech platform makers like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Given what happened with Microsoft in the 1990s and early 2000s, I spent a decade or more wondering when antitrust regulators would wake up to this problem, given that these companies today are all much, much bigger than Microsoft was at the dawn of the 21st century. Worse, each addresses a market of billions, not tens or hundreds of millions. The volume of abuse these companies rain down on our industry, on customers, partners, competitors, developers, and everyone in between, is astonishing. And that abuse has gone unchallenged for far too long.

Until recently.

With the slow-moving European Union somehow leading the way, each of these firms has found itself being scrutinized, investigated, formally charged, and in some breathtaking recent cases, found guilty of their obvious abuses. This is happening around the globe, finally, and at every level. With few exceptions, Big Tech has responded to these unwanted challenges with the same child-like obstinance that Microsoft exhibited during its first antitrust case, in the US, in the late 1990s. At that time, we might have semi-excused its ridiculous behavior because this industry was so young and full of promise, and it was only one company, a company that was on the one hand an American success story that didn’t just define the industry it ruled, but arguably invented it (or at least co-invented it) out of nothing in the first place. How could we punish that kind of success?

Easily. Microsoft’s success then, like Big Tech’s success today, wasn’t all organic and legal, the result of making the best products for the best prices. Unfortunately for all these companies, bad behavior–illegal behavior–obviates the good when it comes to the law. It doesn’t matter if, say, Windows was better than its competition if Microsoft also engaged in illegal behaviors to beat and then eliminate those competitors and then leveraged its new monopoly to illegally enter new markets and illegally maintain and even grow its share of the market. Which is what Microsoft did, of course. And what Big Tech has been doing for over a decade now.

I celebrate each time a government or regulatory body scrutinizes any Big Tech company, product, or service. I do so because I am not here to cheerlead Microsoft or the other Big Tech companies, I am here to support the consumers–people–who pay for their products and services. And we all deserve to be treated better. This doesn’t mean that every case should or will result in formal charges and then some form of punishment in which these companies are forced to change their business practices. It only means that this scrutiny is always warranted. Sometimes that scrutiny will lead to further actions. Sometimes it will not.

But let me bring this back down to earth. This isn’t a high-minded and idealistic theory. You can see the impact of antitrust on dominant companies for yourself. Sometimes in big ways–the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is the regulatory equivalent of tossing a grenade in a room in that its impact is wide, broad, and obvious–and sometimes in small ways. When critics of antitrust argue that Microsoft’s antitrust troubles in the 1990s and early 2000s somehow didn’t result in any positive change, the retort is easily made.

Bullshit.

Aside from the obvious–a distracted Microsoft that couldn’t destroy competitors as before led to a more heterogeneous personal computing industry that allowed innovation to occur, giving consumers more choice–one can point to seemingly small changes to specific products that did, in fact, have profound and long-lived impact. For example, the Default apps interface in Windows came out of its antitrust troubles. For almost two decades, Windows users could click a button in some UI and ensure that every time they wanted to open a web link their preferred web browser was used. Microsoft was forced to respect the user’s choices. That this good work, this good behavior, is now being actively undermined in Windows 11 again demonstrates the need for antitrust oversight, shows what happens when that oversight ends. Dominant, abusive companies like Microsoft will always turn to enshittification like this when their needs outweigh the needs of their paying customers. Round and round we go.

Literally. Yesterday, I upgraded my iPhone to the first iOS 18.2 beta. I (re)joined the Apple Developer program this year specifically to monitor what it’s doing with AI, and it’s been an interesting ride. But iOS 18.2 is a bigger leap forward than I expected. And among the changes is an interesting new UI in the Settings app. It will seem familiar. It’s called Default apps. And it works just like Default apps did in Windows for 15+ years. By which I mean, it’s simple and obvious and actually works. It supports multiple app types like web browsers, email, messaging, and so on. And it’s what Apple should have done all along. (If you don’t know the convoluted ways in which Apple undermines user choice with Safari, in particular, there’s no need to weigh in. The initial UI was purposefully convoluted and designed to confuse users.)

More to the point, it’s what Apple–a belligerent, abusive monopolist just like Microsoft before it–would have never done had it not been forced to by regulators. That this one example of forced change–and there are so many others–is identical to what Microsoft was forced to do in what now feels like centuries ago once again speaks to the need for these companies to be regulated on an ongoing basis. They will always reveal their true selves otherwise. This is literally why antitrust exists: Dominant companies will ultimately stop doing right by their customers, and they will abuse them, their partners, their competitors, and everyone else to maintain and extend their dominance. This behavioral pattern has existed since the dawn of the first companies and without exception at scale. Big Tech and personal technology are in no way special in this regard, but they are worse. Again, because the market sizes they address are global and bigger than anything we saw in the past.

Today, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others all need to bow to the legal requirements of the DMA. Each has been found guilty of specific abuses all over the world. Google, incredibly, was found to have illegal monopolies in search and mobile apps in the US, and while the inevitable changes are still years away because these are big issues and the time the legal system requires is justified, that change will come. As it will to all of Big Tech. There will be pushback because bad, old regimes always push back before they die off or accept change. There will be defeats, and setbacks, as we’ve seen with Epic v. Apple, or in Apple implementing some improvements in the EU but not elsewhere, though they will correct themselves in turn. This change is inevitable. This change is overdue. And this change is breathtaking.

Even something as small as a Default apps interface in iOS, something that was likewise inevitable and overdue, falls into this same bucket. It’s a small thing. A simple thing. A single change in a sea of changes coming to this platform.

And it, too, is breathtaking.