In 1999 Microsoft was sued for monopolizing the market; I think that lawsuit was unnecessary and just made Microsoft software prices more expensive. 9 years later things have changed dramatically; Microsoft is no longer the “big brother” they used to be, I believe if Microsoft does not change it’s approach they will be a has-been Operating System in the next 5 to ten years. I have already noticed Switzerland does not sell their computers with Windows instead they come with RedHat Solaris.
Present day 2008 a rather new player into the tech world is looking at as a possible monopoly; but not for an Operating System; basically they have monopolized the entire internet. Most people have at least one of the follow Google accounts. A Gmail email account, Ad manager, iGoogle , YouTube, the Chrome Browser, and let’s not forget the Android Google’s new phone.
As you can see Google controls almost all the ads on the internet, and a lot of people use gmail for E-mail because of all the new applications coming available for it like Google Talk. I would like to say that’s all Google controls but that isn’t the case; they own YouTube the biggest video site on the internet at their grasp which they acquired for 1.6 billion dollars in 2006. Google’s buyout of Youtube did not make much sense until the Android phone’s specs were released which contains the feature to watch Youtube; may I add this is the only phone that I am aware of that currently supports Youtube.
Apparently everything hasn’t been as cozy in Mountain View, California as Google tries to make it seem. A group of former Google engineers have created a new search engine called Cuil (pronounced cool) which is supposed to be more efficient then Google and less expensive.
Their would be a major problem if Google got sued for a monopoly; Youtube could start charging to upload videos, gmail could charge for 1 gigabyte of space and only give people 500 megabytes for free. I am trying to say that Google has a lot of products for free and if sued for the Monopoly they have created we the end users are going to be the ones that suffer.