MGSC05H3 Lecture Notes - Network Effect, Optometry, Richard Wolf
Document Summary
Microsoft was fighting two battles, legal (anti-trust, netscape and bundling issue) and network externalities (dominance in one market might affect other markets, everybody is on the. The public was watching the legal issues and the government issue. Ms did not dispute the claim that ie is hard to uninstall, they accepted it. Ms also used bill gates to write opinion pieces to newspapers to defend what it was doing in court. One of the things that bill gates wrote was: consumers have a certain expectation about what they are going to get on their desktops when their operating system is windows. It"s like if they are buying the nyt news paper and they see the wsj business section inside. The online world is not like that anyway, so the metaphor doesn"t work. Not that easy for the consumer to throw out one browser.
