TECH AND MONOPOLY IS SYNONYMOUS

What is it about tech and monopoly? If tech makes everything in your life easy then for a tech giant it makes a monopoly easy too. The amount of monopolies that tech has had is quite high. While the US has strong anti-trust laws, they haven’t been able to do much to Silicon Valley

- Sunil Rajguru

Desktop OS

Windows and Desktop Operating System are almost synonymous. There was the duality of Windows and Mac, but in terms of market share, it was only about the former. Depending on which decade you look or which large market, the percentage of Windows domination was always in the 80s or 90s. That didn’t change much when initially the laptop came. And it wasn’t just about the OS, even MS Word, MS PPT, MS Excel all dominated. Remember Lotus 1-2-3? One doubts if anyone remembers it today. It was Microsoft all the way. Add the Intel chip and it was the era of Wintel (Windows + Intel). In the 1990s there was an antitrust case against Microsoft, but nothing came of it. One headline even billed it as the battle of the Bills. But Bill Clinton retired as US President at the end of the millennium and Gates is still relevant in the 2020s.

Search

Here again there only seems to be one player. Yahoo Search flattered to deceive! Bing tried but despite its muscle and money power couldn’t do much. Many players like Ask Jeeves and DuckDuckGo couldn’t dent Google. The Web is at the mercy of the Google algorithms and spiders. It was Facebook which came out with private content that wasn’t publicly available thanks to its exclusive 2.5 billion users.

Video watching

While sites like Vimeo made a niche with high quality videos and TikTok ruled the young mobile short video mindspace, if you look at the video watching, it is largely about YouTube which has been a colossus. In 2017, it was estimated that one billion hours of content was watched a day and since then it has only grown.

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