I wonder if a more-organized democracy would buy them out and make them state-owned.
Terms like
- You won, Windows is very popular, we are going to buy it and open source it, no more ads, no more opt-out telemetry
- Same with Office
- Same with Github
- Maybe they can keep running Azure, since it's unpopular
- XBox and Kinect and all the hardware stuff can stay private since it's not a monopoly and not de-facto public infrastructure
I wish I could live to see government that is both good and powerful, you know
I would think so, given how important (whether we at HN like it or not) their stack has become, it's basically critical infrastructure at this point for a lot of industries.
I think I could see that happening to several companies, not just MS as well - once something gets so huge that it would be detrimental to the survival of a nation if it failed, it gets nationalized.
> - Maybe they can keep running Azure, since it's unpopular
That I'm not sure about though. Azure is unpopular with SaaS, but it's increasingly popular with non-tech enterprises, as well as basically anyone that remotely competes with Amazon. Good chance that if a company's core product isn't SaaS, they are on Azure.
There's no such thing as a large bureaucratic organization that is "good". The larger the scale, the less morality enters into the picture at all.
Making large companies state-owned wouldn't preclude them from being monopolies, it just changes who's in charge of monopoly abuse. With state-owned monopolies you end up with something more like USSR.
No, OP is right: this much concentrated power just shouldn't be allowed, period.
I disagree. The EU one of the largest and most bureaucratic organisations in the world and while they often make dumb laws - especially around technology - it's usually at least with the intent of making things better for people.
State owned monopolies really only make sense for natural monopolies (e.g. transport and communications infrastructure), and I wouldn't really count desktop operating systems as that. Windows is a monopoly due to extremely strong network effects.
That sounds like a good partial solution. Unfortunately, it's easier for governments to use tax dollars to expand, create more comfortable positions for federal civil servants, and watch the money roll in.