John said:
Maybe, but the argument was Microsoft's business versus other
software publishers business.
Microsoft does almost all its business in operating systems and its
Office suite. It has very little competition in both domains. It
does not and cannot compete in any of the other thousands of
application domains for PCs in the world, and even if it tried, it
would be up against a lot of well-entrenched competition. The
concerns about monopoly are thus exaggerated and not always well
placed.
Microsoft will eventually self-destruct. The golden age of the
company in terms of development was over a decade ago. Revenue trails
development by some years but it is notable that the stock price of
Microsoft is no longer on the rise. The company is increasingly
concerned with maintaining the revenue stream and making money
generally, and less and less concerned with actually doing business in
the computer industry. All companies go through this, especially
after their founders retire or after an IPO, and it is their eventual
downfall.
So those who hate Microsoft need only be patient. Although it
probably won't help much, because people who need to hate other people
always manage to find new targets for their hate when the old ones
disappear.
You mean Microsoft bundles it with Windows.
Sometimes, yes. It's hard to make money on it as a separate product.
It's not a very good office-automation suite.
Unless you believe in communism, then you might understand that
monopolies can be bad for our economy.
Not necessarily. A lot of public utilities are run as regulated
monopolies, because that's the only practical way to provide certain
goods and services. In the case of computer operating systems, the
overwhelming dominance of one operating system provides
standardization and stability that hugely increases the number of
available applications and encourages development and innovation in
application systems, because it provides a very large, guaranteed
market for any application written to run with the majority operating
system. If there were five equally popular operating systems running
on PCs, there would essentially be five different universes of
applications as well, none of them completely adequate to address all
the needs of the entire market. A lot of people would have to have
multiple PCs just to run all the applications they might need.
Our system thrives on competition.
Some parts do, some parts don't. We don't have competition for the
military. We don't have competition for first-class mail. In any
given area there is virtually no competition for telephone service.
Sometimes monopolies serve society better. Usually they have to be
heavily regulated if they are turned over to private concerns in order
to prevent abuse, though.
That's not what programmers say.
Programmers don't always know what they are talking about.
From whom? Not ordinary consumers.
You keep saying that and and then dodging the question about whether
those thousands of other programs are very meaningful profit wise.
They are extremely meaningful to the companies that produce them.
Without a single dominant platform for applications, many applications
would never see the light of day, because there simply would not be
enough of a market to recover their costs of development. The larger
the market, the easier it is to make money developing an application
for that market. You see far more applications for Windows, and far
more specialized and obscure applicatons for Windows, than you do for,
say, the Mac, precisely because of this phenomenon. A lot of unusual
applications that you can get for Windows will never exist on the Mac,
because the market for the Mac is too small to cover the cost of
developing (or even porting) the application.
I guess that stuff depends on your definition of "too successful".
I'm talking about Microsoft Corp., the owner of Windows, the
required monopoly operating system for personal computers.
Why just Microsoft? Lots of companies are just as successful as
Microsoft. What property do you propose to seize from them? Why
aren't you complaining about Intel, for example?
