Posted on 04/25/2002 3:56:50 PM PDT by Registered
If the marketplace really were free, you would have a point. If you had been paying casual attention to the MS anti-trust trials, you would know that the marketplace is in no way free, but illegally controlled by Microsoft.
| I dont know if I can blame Gates. He may be smiling on the outside, but consider who he is sitting near. This guy has shaken down many a corp. Who's to say that this isnt the ultiamte shakedown? DO you think Jesse is there because he likes MS products.
I mean... you're Bill Gates, you're sitting there, and up comes Jesse Jackson. He wants you to pose for a picture with the kid. What do you do, say no? Now he's got ya. Next comes the picture at the podium with the linked hands. Again... what do you do, say no? You can see the headline in your head: "Bill Gates Insults Jesse Jackson, Racism Questions Raised." Who needs that crap? Grin and bear it; it's only a damned picture. I think Gates is one of those guys who was a Democrat all his life because they used to go after Big Business on behalf of the Little Guy. And then one day he woke up and he was big business... and they were coming after him. Another Road-to-Damascus conversion, heh heh. |
If the marketplace really were free, you would have a point. If you had been paying casual attention to the MS anti-trust trials, you would know that the marketplace is in no way free, but illegally controlled by Microsoft.
This is only if you accept the charges against Microsoft.
The idea that Microsoft might unfairly exploit the advantages it has in the marketplace..which it has in fact earned through it's own success seems to me to borderline on fair game in the arena of free market competition.
I disagree with your claim that "the marketplace is in no way free, but illegally controlled by Microsoft"...
Microsoft has not held a gun to anyone's head and forced them to buy their products....I and everybody else who has made Microsoft #1 have bought their products out of our own free choice.
Wirestripper, are you referring to the $150miil of preferred stock that Microsoft bought several years ago?
Microsoft sold that stock a year after they bought it ... made a tidy little profit while they were at it.
And besides, that $150mil was about two DAYS worth of Apple's gross revenues at the time ... it certainly made good publicity for Microsoft, but Apple's been "going out of business" for 25 years now, so they must be doing something right. :-)
There are good alternatives to almost anything microsoft puts out - and they are all a lot cheaper.
Oh, yeah...I forgot about that one.
You know, I don't necessarily agree with Dominic Harr on everything, but he made a very interesting observation: that there is a striking similarity between the way Democrats blindly defended Bill Clinton and the way many people here defend Bill Gates.
You can keep piling fact upon fact, but they will ignore it all, because they think he's their hero or something.
They will also repeatedly claim that Bill Gates created millions of jobs, pretending that the jobs wouldn't have been created had there been other software to choose from, and forgetting entirely about all the good people who Microsoft put out of work through their monopolistic tactics.
I'd just like to be able to buy a laptop, and not be forced to buy a copy of Windows with it. Something just doesn't smell right when one cannot do that in a supposedly "free" market.
Go with Mandrake is you have no Linux experience, it is the easiest to setup and maintain IMHO. I use Redhat for servers but prefer Mandrake for desktop and general application use. If you have to use Windows, I just saw a new release of www.Gobe.com for the office component...much cheaper, and supposedly close in functionality...but have not tried that one.
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That's what I figure, too.