Last year, Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, seemed to break with the company’s longstanding “complain instead of compete” strategy to acknowledge that:
We’re going to innovate with a challenger mindset…. We’re not coming at this as some incumbent.
Among the first items on his agenda? Treating competing platforms like opportunities for innovation and expansion rather than obstacles to be torn down by any means possible:
We are absolutely committed to making our applications run what most people describe as cross platform…. There is no holding back of anything.
Earlier this week, at its Build Developer Conference, Microsoft announced its most significant initiative yet to bring about this reality: code built into its Windows 10 OS that will enable Android and iOS developers to port apps into the Windows ecosystem more easily.
To make this possible… Windows phones “will include an Android subsystem” meant to play nice with the Java and C++ code developers have already crafted to run on a rival’s operating system…. iOS developers can compile their Objective C code right from Microsoft’s Visual Studio, and turn it into a full-fledged Windows 10 app.
Microsoft also announced that its new browser, rebranded as “Edge,” will run Chrome and Firefox extensions, and that its Office suite would enable a range of third-party services to integrate with Office on Windows, iOS, Android and Mac.
Consumers, developers and Microsoft itself should all benefit from the increased competition that these moves are certain to facilitate.
Most obviously, more consumers may be willing to switch to phones and tablets with the Windows 10 operating system if they can continue to enjoy the apps and extensions they’ve come to rely on when using Google and Apple products. As one commenter said of the move:
I left Windows phone due to the lack of apps. I love the OS though, so if this means all my favorite apps will be on the platform I’ll jump back onto the WP bandwagon in a heartbeat.
And developers should invest more in development when they can expect additional revenue from yet another platform running their apps and extensions, with minimal additional development required.
It’s win-win-win. Except perhaps for Microsoft’s lingering regulatory strategy to hobble Google.
That strategy is built primarily on antitrust claims, most recently rooted in arguments that consumers, developers and competitors alike are harmed by Google’s conduct around Android which, it is alleged, makes it difficult for OS makers (like Cyanogen) and app developers (like Microsoft Bing) to compete.
But Microsoft’s interoperability announcements (along with a host of other rapidly evolving market characteristics) actually serve to undermine the antitrust arguments that Microsoft, through groups like FairSearch and ICOMP, has largely been responsible for pushing in the EU against Google/Android.
The reality is that, with innovations like the one Microsoft announced this week, Microsoft, Google and Apple (and Samsung, Nokia, Tizen, Cyanogen…) are competing more vigorously on several fronts. Such competition is evidence of a vibrant marketplace that is simply not in need of antitrust intervention.
The supreme irony in this is that such a move represents a (further) nail in the coffin of the supposed “applications barrier to entry” that was central to the US DOJ’s antitrust suit against Microsoft and that factors into the contemporary Android antitrust arguments against Google.
Frankly, the argument was never very convincing. Absent unjustified and anticompetitive efforts to prop up such a barrier, the “applications barrier to entry” is just a synonym for “big.” Admittedly, the DC Court of Appeals in Microsoft was careful — far more careful than the district court — to locate specific, narrow conduct beyond the mere existence of the alleged barrier that it believed amounted to anticompetitive monopoly maintenance. But central to the imposition of liability was the finding that some of Microsoft’s conduct deterred application developers from effectively accessing other platforms, without procompetitive justification.
With the implementation of initiatives like the one Microsoft has now undertaken in Windows 10, however, it appears that such concerns regarding Google and mobile app developers are unsupportable.
Of greatest significance to the current Android-related accusations against Google, the appeals court in Microsoft also reversed the district court’s finding of liability based on tying, noting in particular that:
If OS vendors without market power also sell their software bundled with a browser, the natural inference is that sale of the items as a bundle serves consumer demand and that unbundled sale would not.
Of course this is exactly what Microsoft Windows Phone (which decidedly does not have market power) does, suggesting that the bundling of mobile OS’s with proprietary apps is procompetitive.
Similarly, in reviewing the eventual consent decree in Microsoft, the appeals court upheld the conditions that allowed the integration of OS and browser code, and rejected the plaintiff’s assertion that a prohibition on such technological commingling was required by law.
The appeals court praised the district court’s recognition that an appropriate remedy “must place paramount significance upon addressing the exclusionary effect of the commingling, rather than the mere conduct which gives rise to the effect,” as well as the district court’s acknowledgement that “it is not a proper task for the Court to undertake to redesign products.” Said the appeals court, “addressing the applications barrier to entry in a manner likely to harm consumers is not self-evidently an appropriate way to remedy an antitrust violation.”
Today, claims that the integration of Google Mobile Services (GMS) into Google’s version of the Android OS is anticompetitive are misplaced for the same reason:
But making Android competitive with its tightly controlled competitors [e.g., Apple iOS and Windows Phone] requires special efforts from Google to maintain a uniform and consistent experience for users. Google has tried to achieve this uniformity by increasingly disentangling its apps from the operating system (the opposite of tying) and giving OEMs the option (but not the requirement) of licensing GMS — a “suite” of technically integrated Google applications (integrated with each other, not the OS). Devices with these proprietary apps thus ensure that both consumers and developers know what they’re getting.
In fact, some commenters have even suggested that, by effectively making the OS more “open,” Microsoft’s new Windows 10 initiative might undermine the Windows experience in exactly this fashion:
As a Windows Phone developer, I think this could easily turn into a horrible idea…. [I]t might break the whole Windows user experience Microsoft has been building in the past few years. Modern UI design is a different approach from both Android and iOS. We risk having a very unhomogenic [sic] store with lots of apps using different design patterns, and Modern UI is in my opinion, one of the strongest points of Windows Phone.
But just because Microsoft may be willing to take this risk doesn’t mean that any sensible conception of competition law and economics should require Google (or anyone else) to do so, as well.
Most significantly, Microsoft’s recent announcement is further evidence that both technological and contractual innovations can (potentially — the initiative is too new to know its effect) transform competition, undermine static market definitions and weaken theories of anticompetitive harm.
When apps and their functionality are routinely built into some OS’s or set as defaults; when mobile apps are also available for the desktop and are seamlessly integrated to permit identical functions to be performed on multiple platforms; and when new form factors like Apple MacBook Air and Microsoft Surface blur the lines between mobile and desktop, traditional, static anticompetitive theories are out the window (no pun intended).
Of course, it’s always been possible for new entrants to overcome network effects and scale impediments by a range of means. Microsoft itself has in the past offered to pay app developers to write for its mobile platform. Similarly, it offers inducements to attract users to its Bing search engine and it has devised several creative mechanisms to overcome its claimed scale inferiority in search.
A further irony (and market complication) is that now some of these apps — the ones with network effects of their own — threaten in turn to challenge the reigning mobile operating systems, exactly as Netscape was purported to threaten Microsoft’s OS (and lead to its anticompetitive conduct) back in the day. Facebook, for example, now offers not only its core social media function, but also search, messaging, video calls, mobile payments, photo editing and sharing, and other functionality that compete with many of the core functions built into mobile OS’s.
But the desire by apps like Facebook to expand their networks by being on multiple platforms, and the desire by these platforms to offer popular apps in order to attract users, ensure that Facebook is ubiquitous, even without any antitrust intervention. As Timothy Bresnahan, Joe Orsini and Pai-Ling Yin demonstrate:
(1) The distribution of app attractiveness to consumers is skewed, with a small minority of apps drawing the vast majority of consumer demand. (2) Apps which are highly demanded on one platform tend also to be highly demanded on the other platform. (3) These highly demanded apps have a strong tendency to multihome, writing for both platforms. As a result, the presence or absence of apps offers little reason for consumers to choose a platform. A consumer can choose either platform and have access to the most attractive apps.
Of course, even before Microsoft’s announcement, cross-platform app development was common, and third-party platforms like Xamarin facilitated cross-platform development. As Daniel O’Connor noted last year:
Even if one ecosystem has a majority of the market share, software developers will release versions for different operating systems if it is cheap/easy enough to do so…. As [Torsten] Körber documents [here], building mobile applications is much easier and cheaper than building PC software. Therefore, it is more common for programmers to write programs for multiple OSes…. 73 percent of apps developers design apps for at least two different mobiles OSes, while 62 percent support 3 or more.
Whether Microsoft’s interoperability efforts prove to be “perfect” or not (and some commenters are skeptical), they seem destined to at least further decrease the cost of cross-platform development, thus reducing any “application barrier to entry” that might impede Microsoft’s ability to compete with its much larger rivals.
Moreover, one of the most interesting things about the announcement is that it will enable Android and iOS apps to run not only on Windows phones, but also on Windows computers. Some 1.3 billion PCs run Windows. Forget Windows’ tiny share of mobile phone OS’s; that massive potential PC market (of which Microsoft still has 91 percent) presents an enormous ready-made market for mobile app developers that won’t be ignored.
It also points up the increasing absurdity of compartmentalizing these markets for antitrust purposes. As the relevant distinctions between mobile and desktop markets break down, the idea of Google (or any other company) “leveraging its dominance” in one market to monopolize a “neighboring” or “related” market is increasingly unsustainable. As I wrote earlier this week:
Mobile and social media have transformed search, too…. This revolution has migrated to the computer, which has itself become “app-ified.” Now there are desktop apps and browser extensions that take users directly to Google competitors such as Kayak, eBay and Amazon, or that pull and present information from these sites.
In the end, intentionally or not, Microsoft is (again) undermining its own case. And it is doing so by innovating and competing — those Schumpeterian concepts that were always destined to undermine antitrust cases in the high-tech sector.
If we’re lucky, Microsoft’s new initiatives are the leading edge of a sea change for Microsoft — a different and welcome mindset built on competing in the marketplace rather than at regulators’ doors.