Open source foiled Microsoft antitrust case

“Google was incorporated in Sept. 1998, one month before the
start of the Microsoft antitrust case.

“‘Open source saved us,’ said Simon Crosby, the CTO of Citrix,
adding that innovation has happened in completely unpredictable
ways over the last decade. For instance, ‘Amazon web services would
not exist if were not for the Xen hypervisor,’ he said.

“But at the time of the antitrust case, the competitive threats
from Google-like companies, cloud computing, and smartphones were
only vaguely imagined.

“What loomed foremost in the courtroom was Microsoft’s massive
market share in desktop operating systems and productivity apps, as
well as the dramatic decline of the Netscape Web browser with the
arrival of Internet Explorer.”

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