What’s Old is New Again (Premium)

As a long-time Microsoft follower, it’s fascinating watching the software giant return to its anticompetitive roots. Indeed, it’s almost a welcome relief after several saccharine years of the feel-good Satya Nadella era.

Almost. Naturally, the company’s competitors are not greeting this reversion with anything close to joy. Instead, these victims can only hope and pray that antitrust regulators—who are far too busy right now trying to do something meaningful to curb the market power of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta—care in the slightest. They’ve only gotten a few nibbles, and both of those—Slack’s complaint against Microsoft Teams and Sony’s endless bitching about the Activision Blizzard acquisition—are both so specious that they’re almost guaranteed to fail.

So let’s start there.

In 2016, Microsoft saw that a tiny upstart called Slack was making more inroads with its traditional enterprise customer base than had any other competitor before it, including Google. The problem was clear: Microsoft needed to solve the Slack problem. And so it proceeded as would any entrenched and dominant monopolist: it offered to buy the company.

But Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates—who, then as now, was far more involved in decision-making than the firm’s executive staff would like the world to believe—was apoplectic. He argued that Microsoft already had everything it needed to defeat Slack, and that there was no reason to buy a company whose technologies it would simply bury in lieu of its own. And so Microsoft instead created Teams, which started life as a Slack clone, of sorts—it was originally a chat-based collaboration client—but with a Microsoft look and feel. And then Microsoft improved Teams frequently and rapidly, adding and adding features and gaining and gaining users. Within just four or five years, Teams had 10 times as many users as Slack.

If this story seems familiar, it’s because this is exactly what Microsoft did previously to Netscape in the late 1990s: after failing to acquire the firm, it set out to destroy it. (The only minor difference being that Microsoft had to license some browser technology from Spyglass to jumpstart that effort.) And the story even ends the same way: right after it complained to antitrust regulators that big, bad Microsoft was killing it, Slack found a well-healed benefactor in Salesforce, which purchased it for $27.7 billion, just as AOL had purchased Netscape for $4.2 billion in 1998. In both cases, Microsoft’s alleged abuses were undercut by the business reality that those failed companies were, in fact, still worth billions and were thus not hurting as much as they had complained. Oops.

I’ve already covered Activision Blizzard many times, but my central opinion—that there are no grounds whatsoever for any regulatory body to block Microsoft’s acquisition—hasn’t changed an iota. More to the point, it is now increasingly obvious that this acquisition will be approved (and that was before the UK CDMA gave up on its senseless objections). Another potential maelstrom dodged, though this one, at least, is proper: Microsoft is the right company to make this acquisition, and it will only make AB’s games more readily available across platforms.

But Antitrust is a tricky thing.

As we saw earlier today with Google’s attempt to get its own U.S. antitrust case dismissed, there are many different ways to interpret the same situation, especially when judges and courts are involved. What I’m more concerned with, what I’m always concerned with in these cases, boils down to fairness. Meaning fairness to consumers, especially, but also fairness in competition. And while that seems overly simplistic, it’s easy to defend: all you need to do is look at a company’s behavior, at the way it changes its products and services, and determine the intent. Were these actions undertaken to improve matters for its users? Or were they done to improve matters for itself and at the expense of its own users or the competition? (And in the latter case, whether that is illegal in the first place, since competition is all about doing things at the expense of competition.)

I’m not a legal expert. But I know fairness when I see it. And increasingly, I see a lot of enshittification going on out there. In fact, it’s almost all I see these days. I see it in the PC I just reviewed that gunked up an otherwise wonderful software experience with an insane number of ads upselling subscription services. In Facebook, which just added a literal advertisement at the top of my Notifications feed. In Instagram, which changed from being a wonderful place to see good photography into a non-stop feed full of ads and sponsored content, all of it video-based. And at Twitter, which is filling its “For You” feed only with paying sponsors, making it really “for Twitter.”

And my God, do I see it in Microsoft’s products.

Indeed, the past few years have seen the great enshittification of Microsoft’s products, which are transitioning into only serving Microsoft’s aims, and not those of its customers.

I complained about some recent changes to Microsoft Word a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t mention the incessant nagging I receive via a yellow bar at the top exhorting me to use OneDrive (which I use and pay for). I’ve complained numerous times about how Microsoft Teams literally interrupts live video meetings to pop-up advertisements about how I can share Excel documents or whatever other nonsense. And I’ve ever pointedly turned on Microsoft Edge, a web browser no one should use, not just because of its horrific feature bloat, but because of its tireless tracking and privacy invasions, because it pops up even when you’ve selected another default browser, and because Windows harasses you endlessly to switch back when you’ve already made your choice, or continuously prompts you to accept the “Microsoft defaults” when you do use Edge, which will enable even more tracking. This product is the very definition of malicious.

But the proper way to view Edge is as just one component of the true vessels of Microsoft’s maliciousness in my book, which is Windows 11. This product, no longer easily monetized by Microsoft thanks to the long-term reliability of PCs and a lack of interest by users, has turned into a weird combination of in-box advertising, sponsored app shortcuts, user tracking and privacy invasions, and a vehicle to guide you, ever less subtly, to Microsoft’s online services and advertising, the success of which leads to new levels of tracking and privacy invasion.

When I read something like this, and I recommend that you do too, if only to understand what we’re up against, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This post doesn’t say anything, certainly not anything resembling the truth. “We have a responsibility to ensure user choices are respected,” Microsoft writes as if it is doing anything like that at all. Windows 11 is designed to ensure that does not happen.

This is the kind of disconnect between marketing and reality that I see at Google. Each year, that firm hosts two major public events, its I/O developer conference in May and a hardware launch event in the fall. And at each, executives speak endlessly about how the company values its users’ privacy, and how its products embody that ideal. But Google is, at heart, an advertising firm, and its status as one of the five biggest companies in the world is ensured by only one thing: violating its users’ privacy and selling that information to advertisers. And so I find the disconnect between what they say and what they do to be impossible to rationalize. It’s so outlandish that it’s almost not even worth discussing.

And so it’s sad to me to see Microsoft slip into this same disconnect. And it’s not just Windows, of course: the past month has seen an explosion in excitement and fear around Artificial Intelligence (AI), an area in which Microsoft had previously shown great restraint. But Microsoft, typically a very conservative company, is actually leading this charge, despite the fact that it didn’t even create the technology it’s championing, nor does it have exclusive access to it. The software giant has thrown caution to the wind and has unleashed the demon for one reason and one reason only: to make money, damn ethics, responsibility, or accuracy.

AI is indeed the biggest thing that’s happened to our world in decades, though I’d point to the Internet and not the GUI as the previous biggest change, as Bill Gates recently stated. That’s not a quibble, either: the Internet made the world’s collective knowledge available to one and all, but AI is curating and presenting it in a way that is immediately useful. The two combined, I think, will have a bigger impact on the human race than the industrial revolution, space travel, nuclear power, or any other breakthrough you care to mention. Whether that’s a good thing remains to be seen, though the outcome is sadly now in the hands of the same madmen who thought it was OK to unleash this in the first place.

Those madmen are from Microsoft. A company we’d all sort of forgotten about, maybe for good reason. That it is now drunk with the power of its suddenly renewed popularity is obvious enough. But the issue here, to bring it back to the antitrust conversation, is fairness and intent. Did Microsoft unleash its third-party-powered AI solutions on the world to make life better for its users or to gain an upper hand on the competition? And if it’s the latter, did it do so at the expense of its users? Would it have hurt to wait, to try and work with the industry on a responsible rollout of these features? Or would it have hurt Microsoft’s bottom line to wait?

Here’s the thing. I’m worried that Microsoft did what it did when it did only because it saw that the post-pandemic financial setbacks were only going to continue and it wanted to bounce back more quickly than it would have organically. That it took this Frankenstein’s monster out of the lab now as a distraction because it was trying to reverse the natural outcome of its bad decisions during the pandemic and make its leadership seem more competent. That this was all about the stock price, as everything is these days at Microsoft.

If I’m right, Microsoft is no better than it ever was at its pre-antitrust nadir. And that’s a shame: for all the nonsense that came out of its antitrust cases of the 1990s and 2000s, we did at least emerge with a better, more ethical company.

I’m already starting to miss it.