[Coco] Re:

[farna at att.net]

U.S. Anti-Trust laws kick in when a company owns more than 60% of a market, I believe. The problem with Microsoft is they lock everyone out of the system and have very aggressive anti-competition tactics. MS made some concessions when they were taken to court by the US gov't a few years ago, making programming access somewhat easier, and MS was forced to change some of its business practices as well. I don't think things went far enough, but that's just my opinion. 

Yes, there are competing products, but for so many years MS went after every competitive product, either buying them, making a competitive product, or modifying Windows to lock the product out. One part of the settlement was they couldn't go back and modify the OS with an "update" that intentionally locked competing products out. Remember when MS decided to add features to HTML? The result was if you used an MS product to create a web page only an MS product would fully function with that page. Things like that are supposedly forbidden in the anti-trust settlement. Such practices are cut-throat for the competition! You can argue that other companies do similar things, but they don't own so much of the market that they effectively close other companies down by doing so. MS has way more than 75% of the PC market. They didn't get it by having anywhere near the "best" system (think back to DOS and the first Windows days), but by cut-throat marketing and squashing everyone else. At first it was "shrewd" marketing, I'll confess, like the original deal with IBM. But as they got bigger the company started simply eliminating competition whenever possible. THAT'S the "problem" most people have with MS -- users are effectively forced to buy MS products now because all effective competition has been squashed. If not for the gov't investigation several years ago I'm sure MS would be trying to do something about Linux. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if some developers working with MS have been told they will be cut off if they release Linux products, but that is PURE SPECULATION on my part!! Don't go spreading any rumors!! 

--
Frank Swygert
Publisher, "American Independent 
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For all AMC enthusiasts
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 -------------- Original message ----------------------
> > Basil,
> > 
> > Not to continue this off-topic rant, but you toss around Microsoft 
> > and 
> > monopoly like it's some kind of "fact".
> > 
> > Microsoft is not a monopoly: Sorry to burst your bubble.
> > 
> > A monopoly was, say, Bell Telephone in the US before it was broken 
> > up. 
> > You wanted a telephone? You had to buy Bell's telephone and service 
> > or 
> > you yelled out the window; there was no choice. Same goes for 
> > Standard 
> > Oil and some of the other classic examples from history. Even your 
> > electric company is a monopoly. (even if it's been "deregulated") 
> > That 
> > doesn't stop you from buying a big diesel generator, parking it in 
> > your 
> > back yard and cutting yourself off from the grid.
> > 
> > Microsoft was never really a monopoly. If you wanted a computer, you 
> > 
> > could buy one. Sure the store-bought machines probably all had DOS 
> > or 
> > Windows on them, but Microsoft couldn't stop you from buying the 
> > parts 
> > off the shelf and building your own PC without their cruft 
> > pre-loaded on 
> > it. You could then be free to load whatever you want, or if you're 
> > really good, write something yourself and run that.
> 
> Since my degree is in Economics, and since in my job I work with a team
> of economists, I figure I ought to comment on this post. 
> 
> Strictly speaking, Mike, you're correct. A 'pure monopoly' is defined as
> a company that produces 100% of the output of an industry. Such a
> situation, however, is very rare. The best example in the real world is
> the example you cited, of utilities such as the electric company.
> 
> Since alternatives do exist to Windows, strictly speaking Microsoft is
> not a pure monopoly in the operating system industry.
> 
> However, there is a spectrum that exists between the two extremes of a
> 'pure monopoly' and 'perfect competition' (the latter term being a
> situation of many firms, each individually producing a small percentage
> of total industry output). In the case of the operating system industry,
> I would categorize it as being a 'near-monopoly'. Microsoft may not have
> a 100% domination, but I've heard that it is around 90% or so. To me
> that's close enough. At that level of dominance, a firm ACTS like a
> monopoly, and Microsoft definitely does that in my opinion.
> 
> So technically Microsoft isn't a pure monopoly, but it's close enough
> (too close, if you ask me).
> 
> Fred Provoncha
> Stansbury Park, UT
>