Posted on 06/16/2008 11:08:41 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Didn't Rockefeller do the Standard Oil monopoly so he could provide cheaper petroleum products to the people?
How many people do you know who've built their own car?
A few. But that doesn't have anything to do with the subject. People building their own rarely advances development in the automobile industry these days. Individual manufacturers with their vertical markets do most of the advancement.
We're comparing one market to another. It's easy to say you're comparing apples to apples if all the differences are irrelevant.
Computers are not automobiles. It's pretty well impossible to build a car so that nobody else can manufacture parts to fit it. You can design an OS to keep it from recognizing anyone else's hardware, and you can build a processor/motherboard that won't work with anyone else's OS.
I though the point was having a vertical market on your product not pushing innovation.
I can see that either method would push innovation, except you couldn’t have very many CPU and GPU producers, as those are too expensive. Of course in cars companies share each others’ engines too.
If Microsoft would start following Apple's example, and start building their own computers, designed so that they would only run Windows, and writing Windows so that it would only run on those computers and a specific set of peripherals what happens to all the other PC and MB manufacturers?
About the only market they'll have is linux.
I’m not sure what would happen in your case. Microsoft’s business model, even the initial success of Microsoft, is dependent on the current structure, and I don’t think they could ever go the Apple way. All the manufacturers would vie for the supply contracts, creating a lot of competition (and associated technological advancement) to get them.
I don't see having only two possible buyers for computer OEM hardware, and virtually no direct retail market for the manufacturers being a formula for increasing technological advancement in the market.
If Apple's approach really is better, and Microsoft has been doing it all wrong then Microsoft needs to do what Apple's been doing. What are the consequences going to be if they do?
The marketplace has room for both business approaches. It’s worked well for Microsoft, it’s working well for Apple. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.
That I can agree with. I just don't agree that Apple is doing everything right, and MS is doing everything wrong. There is room for both approaches, and while it's just my opinion, I believe that Apple and the linux community have benefitted from Microsoft's approach.
Nearly all of the linux installations out there, and development work that's been done (and I think Apple has benefitted from a lot of that) is on machines that were originally shipped with Windows. If MS had taken Apples approach 15 years ago, finding a machine to install a linux distro on would be virtually impossible for the average person today - they would simply refuse to install and work with anything but Windows.
Microsoft's approach really helped computers become ubiquitous and everyone benefitted, but IMHO that was at a slower level of advancement. Such a mass market creates inertia that is hard to change to advance the technology. Do you think 90%+ of computers would still be using BIOS if Microsoft had supported EFI or another advanced firmware years ago? They had a real chicken and egg problem.
Vertical companies like Sun, SGI, Apple and others pushed the envelope with advanced technology. It's easier for them to advance, as seen in Apple's complete phased abandonment of their old OS. That is something necessary for Microsoft, but they are wisely afraid to do it given their market.
If that's what they need to do, then we can pretty well kiss general-purpose, OS agnostic computers goodbye as a commodity. Future OS development will be pretty well limited to the commercial OS vendors who have access to the proprietary hardware specs, and hardware development will be pretty well confined to the vendors that have a relationship with those vendors.
There's an air of government fixism in the air today as the dems announce plans to nationalize oil.
Always a bad idea to get government into the markets.
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