Comment by userbinator a day ago
They started going down that route many years ago now (Windows 10 "telemetry" being a critical inflection point), but the Microsoft of the 80s and 90s and even early 2000s was not about mass surveillance but selling software.
It seems like a modern truism:
There is no such thing as an anti-war movie, because anti-war imagery is the same imagery that pro-war films use, it’s just the interpretation and meanings are reversed.
Might it also be true, that there is no such thing as effective antitrust enforcement, because the one doing the investigating and enforcement is unwilling or unable to kill the goose that lays golden eggs, because their own employer’s budget and state apparatus directly and indirectly relies upon taxing golden eggs. Perhaps we’re all just carrying water for giants and giant-collaborators, whether or not giants even exist.
I didn't imply foul play. I never studied the details and I actually like a bit of vertical integration in tech (but not like Apple does it), so I don't have strong views about that case - but even assuming Microsoft really was in the wrong here and were justly told to stop, what I'm much more sure of is, advertising-based business models are worse, but also this was not obvious at the time. Still isn't to many. And so when Microsoft could not make money doing a bad thing, that became illegal, they turned to an even worse thing that wasn't (and still isn't) illegal.
Perhaps you’re right, but by the time Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1997, MSN was already two years old and had its own dialup service. Microsoft knew what they were doing.