His understanding of history is... seriously deficient
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| AnonymousCoward Jun 25, 2005 5:55 AM EDT |
So his conclusions are, as one would expect, of commensurate quality. |
| PaulFerris Jun 25, 2005 9:28 AM EDT |
AC: yeah, we don't have access to an alternate reality to compare against where maybe true competition thrived and everyone is safer, happier and paying less for software. This kind of speculation makes me sick. I will never "be grateful to" Microsoft for what they've done -- we'll never know the good choices or companies that might have existed without their embrace and extinguish attitudes -- and the idiots that defend their practices forget that it was people who wanted a competitive economy that created anti-trust law. What makes me sick is this type of person is often the same type of person who is disgusted by charity -- yet they're asking for charity -- "please don't be so unhappy with Microsoft! Please!". Nope, not gonna happen. --FeriCyde |
| richo123 Jun 25, 2005 9:59 AM EDT |
Yes as someone on the left I have always found it hard to understand how many (but not all) free market advocates of the 1980s now defend entrenched monopolies like Microsoft. I guess if M$ is paying them for their advocacy then that is just the market at work really.... ;-) ;-) |
| dinotrac Jun 25, 2005 10:17 AM EDT |
richo123 -- It's a tricky thing... I don't think you'll find many free market advocates defending illegal monopolies. The flip side of defending the free market is to avoid punishing successful companies just because they have competed well. Having monopolistic market share is not evil so long as it is possible for competition to arise. That's been the question with Microsoft -- although, ahem, they were convicted of illegally using their monopoly power, a conviction that was upheld unanimously on appeal. I'm not sure that I would have prosecuted Microsoft -- their monopoly has been coming apart nicely on its own -- but Microsoft was prosecuted and found guilty of breaking the law. They should be viewed with the appropriate level of suspicion. |
| majones Jun 25, 2005 10:35 AM EDT |
The timeline was seriously compressed, I'll give you that. But it pretty much happened that way. I've been in the business of this stuff since the very very early '80s. If we continued with the CLI, it wasn't happening in volume. I actally preferred, for businesses at that time, Novell Netware, WordPerfect and their WP Office stuff... but the customer began to demand MS - LanMan, Word, the whole deal. Even running on OS/2 so they could get the graphical desktop. It was nasty, but it was what they wanted. I won't even debate the accounting software side of this - I lived that dream and it's undeniable. Don't get me wrong - I didn't say I agreed with the tactics, the quality of the products, etc.... It's simply the truth that their marketing concepts (like empowerment) did cause people to BUY. That's the whole point. Not that I like it, but really - would we be here doing what we're doing today without the market being where it is? My crystal ball is broken, so I can only see what is, as opposed to what might have been. |
| richo123 Jun 25, 2005 11:21 AM EDT |
Dino I agree free marketeers would/should not defend M$, it just surprises me to see many people I remember as free market advocates from the 80s defending such obvious abuses of power and obviously contradicting their apparently old ideology. Sounds like you are not in that category ;-) |
| PaulFerris Jun 26, 2005 12:56 PM EDT |
majones: Quoting:Not that I like it, but really - would we be here doing what we're doing today without the market being where it is? My crystal ball is broken, so I can only see what is, as opposed to what might have been. Interesting -- that's a defense for and against my point of view. We won't know. What we can know is stuff like, oh for example, a deal with Stack electronics that went south. Microsoft went to them and said "We want your disk compression for DOS 6.0". The reason? Because DR-DOS was shipping with a competing disk compression, and Microsoft had none. Now, in a free market, they might have said something like "Hey, we'll give you back $2 bucks for every copy of DOS sold", but that's not what happened (this all came out in court). They wanted Stacker to simply give them the technology to put in there, in exchange for (this is from memory here, so it might be off) "The chance to bask in the Microsoft Orb". The alternative was worse -- Microsoft said "Do it, or we'll write our own and give it away -- and put you out of business." They've repeatedly done this in the past. Who knows if it's still going on, as recently there just hasn't been a huge number of companies with capital to spend attempting to make a competing desktop OS... Back to the Stack story: Stack said no. Microsoft took a binary shot of the main subroutine, and included it in DOS 6.0 -- and got nailed a year or so later in court. Stack won the lawsuit, but was bought out to the tune of something like 150 million dollars. There's some real competitive abuse for you -- were consumers harmed? you might ask. Given the utter lack of competition, and the fact that their products are so insecure, I can only venture my (obviously biased) opinion here -- YES, consumers have been harmed! They don't have a clue why, all they know is that they're always getting viruses and the like -- and No, I don't think that it would be that way in a truly competitive market -- simply because in a market where say, half the market was owned by another proprietary vendor even -- the virus writers would have to concentrate on two different platforms at least. Maybe, just maybe, had there been some kind of market equity, someone in Redmond might have had to secure their products a lot earlier in the equation -- say, oh, in 1995 or so, instead of now. Maybe in that alternate reality, I would not be down at my neighbors house, or my relatives, reloading crud for them (By the way, I've converted 3 of 4 to Linux -- the last hold-outs simply haven't hit the threshold). I'll turn rant mode off now. --FeriCyde |
| tuxchick Jun 26, 2005 6:25 PM EDT |
They have hurt competition in an even bigger way than destroying competing software vendors- their cozy deals with PC vendors long ago took away any choice for computer buyers. You pay the microsoft tax no matter what, with the exception of independent mom n pop shops or building your own. It still frosts me that the DOJ missed that one completely, and instead went for the big dog n pony show that focused on nothing and went nowhere. Sure, we have some small Linux shops now, and Linspire boxes, and other cracks in the wall. But it never should have taken this long to have real choices. |
| PaulFerris Jun 27, 2005 3:14 AM EDT |
tuxchick: well said. Want something else to frost those cookies of yours -- when Bill "What's good for Microsoft is good for America" Gates was interviewed by Congress, he had the stinking gall to say "Prices have come down." Literally lieing in plain sight (pun intended) was the fact that yes, PC prices were lower -- but Microsoft was charging more and more for their operating system. He was talking about the hardware -- now, back in the dark ages of PC computing, Microsoft's take was in the small percentages. 25 bucks on a system that cost you 2 grand was peanuts compared to what they get for XP today. It's huge as a percentage and it's definitely higher than 25 bucks -- Pricess have come down my 455. Of course, no one in the media even remotely called him on it -- and don't even think one congressional person in the room made any noise. I'm sure it had nothing to do with their (at the time) recently stepped up lobbying. Damn, I said I turned Rant_mode off, where the heck is that switch again... |
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