Must-read: Ben Thompson: “Antitrust and Aggregation”

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Antitrust and Aggregation: “What ultimately undid Microsoft…

…and why that $95 billion revenue figure was a peak; the current trailing twelve month number is $87 billion–was that even as Windows continued to have a monopoly on laptops and desktops the definition of a computer was dramatically expanded to include smartphones (and, to a lesser extent, tablets). And while many Microsoft partisans argue that the antitrust-related restrictions caused the company to miss mobile, the truth is Apple’s iPhone succeeded by being a very different product than Windows, and Android leveraged a very different business model; if anything Microsoft’s PC dominance meant their mobile failure was inevitable as the company was ill-equipped to think differently…