[Coco] [Color Computer] end of discussion!

[Mike Pepe]

Hey Jan,

Sorry, I really have to disagree with you. I hate to "defend" those 
people, surely they don't need me to do it, they have teams of lawyers 
who make more in a day than I do in a year to do that.!

> So, 95% of the microcomputers sold in the world, running a MS OS, isn't a
> monopoly ? How high do you want it to go before it is ?

100%. What market are you talking about? "Desktop OS that runs on an IBM 
compatible platform"? Desktop computers in general? The entire IT 
industry? I don't see they are a monopoly in any of those areas. They 
don't sell hardware. They have no control over what you do with it.

> Oh come on. People on tis list are computer savvy. How many ordinary user
> would/could do that ? Nowadays, you pay more if you build yourself, than if
> you buy e.g. Dell.

You can go to any well-stocked computer store and buy a Mac.

And Dell is far more "monopolistic" than M$ from any way you look at it, 
and yet they're perhaps the #1 market share today. Are they a monopoly 
too? On the 'evil scale' I'd put dell a LOT higher.

> No, you also have to look at market share. And MS has it.

Again, what market? In the IT industry as a whole, there are dozens of 
hardware platforms and operating systems. Many of those run on the same 
hardware that Windoze runs on. By definition, they're not a monopoly.

And I hate to say it, but one of the overriding factors that saved 
Microsoft from its antitrust suit was the fact that Linux existed.

> They are pointing the gun at your suppliers. See my other messages. Read the
> web. Plenty of examples.

Not really. You make valid points, but at the same time, you must 
understand what and how Microsoft did to get the way they are. I don't 
think any company would be unhappy to be in the position they are in. 
But, they got that way because of us, the consumer. As the consumers, we 
decided that we wanted to run the same programs that the guy down the 
street was running. We decided that compatibility and ubiquity was the 
overriding factor in making decisions as to what we wanted to buy. It 
was very convenient to go to the software store to have the choice to 
buy from the thousands of programs they sold there without having to 
deal with the "Oh I have a TRS-80 and all those cool games run on the 
Atari" syndrome that plagued most of us 20 years ago.

A monopoly by definition means you have no choice. A cable TV provider 
is a monopoly. In the IT world you have a choice. You have IBM, Sun, HP, 
Apple. You have Windows, UNIX, 50 kinds of Linux, BSD, etc...

Just because you hate them, because they have most of the market share, 
because we the industry decided we wanted compatibility with what 
everyone else is running does not a monopoly make.

And in the sense of being "held hostage" by them... I'm not sure why you 
think that. Why would a company spend untold amounts of money to develop 
a product and then give away the details of how it was developed? They 
are a private company, and they have no reason to do that. If you think 
that makes them evil, fine. If they were a Belgian company, would you 
think the same way?

anyway, we can discuss this offline. Let's get back to computer 
companies that no longer exist...


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