But there’s still considerable debate about whether it was the government lawsuit that nudged the company into an abyss of late-to-the-party products such as the Zune MP3 player and the Bing search engine. Microsoft may have simply been too bloated by the turn of the century to outflank more nimble competitors like Google and Apple. This is not the kind of ’90s nostalgia the titans of the internet had in mind.
To say history is repeating itself isn’t quite accurate, but in recent times we’ve seen a former tech wunderkind dragged in front of Congress, a raft of Hollywood productions casting our handheld gadgets as a bridge to dystopia, and a chorus of calls for the tech giants to be dismantled by the government.
The “don’t be evil” optics that colored the rise of today’s tech giants (and have recently lost their efficacy) were a direct response to Microsoft’s tyrannical rule. The company was big enough to be crowned America’s most valuable firm, bold enough to compare attacks on its domain to Pearl Harbor, and, eventually, bad enough to be portrayed as a (semifictionalized) cadre of hypercapitalist murderers in a major motion picture. Its most famous victim was Netscape, the pioneering web browser, but everyone from Apple to American Airlines felt threatened by late-’90s Microsoft. The then-23-year-old giant, which ruled the personal computer market with a despotic zeal, stood accused of using monopoly power to bully collaborators and squelch competitors. Justice Department and 20 state attorneys general filed an antitrust suit against the most powerful tech company in America: Microsoft. In hindsight, these were tectonic shifts, but they hardly registered as tremors compared to the earthquake emanating from Washington, D.C. A fast-growing online bookstore hatched a plan to start selling, well, everything. An innovative search engine originally known as BackRub became a company with an even stranger name. A nearly bankrupt relic of ’80s tech nostalgia released a gumdrop-shaped PC called the iMac. Nineteen-ninety-eight changed the course of technology, which is to say that it changed the course of history.
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