Is Microsoft a Monopolist?

This article concerning the late ’90’s Antitrust suit filed against Microsoft is essentially a summary of the various arguments that were made.  A portion of the article discusses the issue that some of Microsoft’s early adoption practices were percieved as monopolistic, especially pertaining to the inclusion of the Internet explorer web browser in a release of Windows 95.

This issue is interesting in relation to our study of network externalities because the US attorneys’ arguments were that Microsoft used its place as the leader in Operating systems to essentially force early adoption of other programs such as Internet Explorer, thus pushing the use of many programs above the critical points necessary for them to become the market leaders.

Since it is not really possible to tell whether a given product was adopted because it is actually the best product or by simple network externality issues, there will probably never be a satisfactory conclusion.  Regardless, this lawsuit demonstrates some of the issues that go along with network externalities as well as the problems with using these principles for legal purposes.