ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the strategies used by Microsoft to gain market power and the resulting antitrust court cases that came about as a result of that power. It begins with a discussion of the products and current financial situation of Microsoft. Microsoft's most important product, its Windows operating system, is a multi-sided platform. The value of a multi-sided platform to one group depends on the participation of another group and vice versa. A firm providing a multi-sided platform, therefore, needs to attract two or more groups to its product. The multi-sided platform nature of Microsoft's products also impacts Microsoft's product design decisions. Adding Application Programming Interface (APIs) attracts more software developers, which in turn attracts more Windows end-users, which in turn ties more original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to Windows and Microsoft. Microsoft employed a number of marketing strategies in the early years of Microsoft-Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) and Windows to increase the popularity of its operating systems.
