How are Bill Gates and Microsoft like John D. Rockefellers Standard Oil?
In more ways than you might think. May 18, 1998 3:45 p.m. (EDT) by Patrick Thibodeau John D. Rockefeller would probably sympathize with Bill Gates. Like Microsoft Corp., Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. controlled about 90% of his market. And as with Microsoft, Rockefeller faced a hostile U.S. government concerned about his company’s rapidly growing market dominance. Rockefeller sold fossil fuels. Gates sells software. But both men faced the same problem: the Sherman Act, the most commonly known part of antitrust law, which was passed in 1890. Indeed, the type of antitrust lawsuit that Microsoft now faces is “not new — we’ve been there before,” said Dr. William Comanor, a former chief economist at the Federal Trade Commission. “Software is becoming the basis of the new economy, but surely that was also true of petroleum in 1912,” the year Standard Oil was broken up, Comanor said. The Department of Justice’s expected antitrust complaint with Microsoft is based on the belief that the comp
