Google is much less adept at avoiding the ire of antitrust agencies, particularly under the current administration. Google is considerably more evil in the popular imagination at this point.
I was, and it seemed absurd at the time. Bundling IE with windows is no different than the current status quo, where Apple defaults to Safari, or Android defaults to a Chrome version.
Google's incredible monopoly in search looks like a large target.
There are other search engines and one can easily just type bing.com into their browser and set it as the default. Even on Chrome.
I'm not sure why you remember MS the way you do. There was a much much larger barrier for consumers to move to a different OS. If you owned a PC you pretty much had to run Windows. And MS made it extremely difficult to use a non-IE browser in the OS.
That doesn't mean I think they're innocent in all things but I don't see how their search market share is a monopoly target.
I have never used IE as my primary browser... I'm sort of amazed at anyone that does use the OS-native browser as their default, because it has almost always been an inferior choice.
For the vast majority of the target audience (i.e., not tech savvy mostly) Internet is the OS-native browser. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't know what a "browser" is in the first place.
As an analogy, during my childhood days when photocopiers came out in India they were mostly Xerox machines. So Xerox became a verb and has stayed a verb to this day. So much so that you will find "Xerox shops"[1] in all Indian cities and people won't understand what a photocopier shop is :-)
I think we just had a different set of ideals back then. I feel like maybe we got tired of fighting the same battles. Or maybe Microsoft was being judged more harshly on moral grounds because their software was also widely criticized for being crashy.
I mean, at the tail end of that period even South Park was lampooning the reliability of Windows. A lot of Google’s products work very well and dependably (well, provided they don’t murder the product), which maybe isolates them from that synergistic hate.
A lot people who are heavily right leaning in terms of policies does not like Google.
I even know a local Swedish podcaster that actively say DuckDuckGo instead of Google when relating to search. I completely understand this because I totally agree with the concept that Google has become politicized like a lot of companies unfortunately have become.
