Posted on 01/06/2003 4:00:44 AM PST by chilepepper
From the title of this paper you may have guessed that I am less than pleased with the guys in Redmond. One might even say that my dislike for Microsoft is a pet hate gone out of control in an almost quixotic fashion. Why is this?
Of course I have been accused of personal antipathy, of being jealous of Bill Gates and his billions, and of being prejudiced against all things Microsoft without any reason whatsoever. But none of this is true. I have nothing personal against Bill Gates. Why should I? I don't know the man, I've never met him. I agree with those who say he might be the most succesful salesman in history. And I've always thought that even one billion in almost any currency is more than I could reasonably spend.
No. It's rather his business practices, and that of his company, that I am opposed to, for a large and still growing number of reasons, most of which are plain, verifiable facts. Let me explain.
Microsoft controls the current software market and has a de facto monopoly on the desktop. This monopoly has not been achieved and is not being maintained by offering the user community better products than Microsoft's competitors can offer. On the contrary, Microsoft has earned a reputation for selling unreliable software.
Windows is a technically inferior operating system with a seriously flawed architecture, weak security model and sloppy code, while other Microsoft applications are equally kludgey. New Microsoft products offer no essential improvements over previous or competing products, and their Return On Investment is between small and zero, in spite of Microsoft's boasts about being innovative and customer-driven.
Instead of making better software, Microsoft has focused on using brilliant but doubtful marketing tactics to force their products upon the user community in order to establish and maintain their monopoly. These methods include a tight integration of applications into the operating system, the bundling of applications with Windows to force competing application vendors out of the market, the mandatory bundling of Windows with new computer equipment, deliberate limitations in the compatibility of their own software with competing products, contracts that prohibit third parties to do business with anyone but Microsoft, and retaliatory practices against non-cooperating vendors. In addition to this, third-party developers are induced, through cheap or free development kits and the sabotaging of alternatives, to develop applications that contain proprietary system calls, are virtually non-portable, and are therefore bound to the MS-Windows platform. These methods only serve to further inflate Microsoft's already obscene profit margins, at the price of the interests of the user community, the IT market and the field of computer technology as a whole.
(Excerpt) Read more at euronet.nl ...
Your memory fails you. Microsoft was indeed found to have illegally maintainted its monopoly.
Bill Gates is an anti-gun, pro-abortion liberal, and Microsoft is filled with PC liberals who oppose fair play and the free market.
So, we should shut down businesses if their employees and corporate officers have incorrect political views? Interesting.
As far as the judgement against Microsoft goes, I believe the important judgement was set aside. Lots of trials don't go the way we'd like. But there was a trial. Microsoft wasn't shut down. Live with it.
And, hey, anyone can sell stuff, regardless of their political views, but if they fund things with which I am in violent disagreement, they can hardly expect my business.
If you like to fund baby killing and the destruction of gun rights, well...I don't know what to tell you.
Naturally, everyone knew that this situation had to be an Evil Monopoly. A huge antitrust suit was cranked up, costing the taxpayers a vast fortune, employing generations of lawyers as it plodded through the courts. Guess what? IBM's "monopoly" evaporated as soon as a new generation of lower-cost "minicomputers" came onto the market and began offering small amounts of computer power at prices that medium sized businesses could afford. Amdahl/Fujitsu cloned the IBM mainframe and began to skim the cream off the mainframe market. By the late Seventies, the microprocessor and integrated circuit had made it possible for small startups like Altair to introduce early personal computers. One of these startups, Apple Corp., introduced a model that became the most popular of its time. IBM, already a shruken remnant of its old self, observed Apple's success and introduced its PC design. Aha, said all the pundits: IBM is "copying" Apple by giving the market what it wants, "embracing and extending" so that it could re-establish its lost "monopoly".
The threat of an IBM monopoly on PC's evaporated once again as dozens of small manufacturers cloned the IBM design. Like Linus Torvalds today, young Bill Gates stepped in bto produce software that would break any incipient IBM monopoly in that area too.
And the rest, as the liberals would have us forget, was history.
The logical segue of a MONOPOLY is to destroy the competition using tactics that if not illegal, are highly questionable.
You missed out completely on what the free market really is and need to reread your Adam Smith: the free market exists because the exchange of INFORMATION relating to value, allowing a purchaser to derive more value from something than the seller (who presumably has a warehouse full of something which is less useful to him than, say, capital which he can invest in new equipment).
What I am doing with this post is EXACTLY THAT, allowing those who might choose Microsoft products in on addition information which THEY may interpret as ADDING TO or SUBTRACTING FROM the value they might place on a Microsoft product. Needless to say, I would contend that since Microsoft tends to stiff-arm older versions of things for strictly marketing reasons, and to re-label the same old crap, these actions would make me question the wisdom of purchasing Microsoft products that my company's future and my job might depend on, but hey, that is just MY ethics clouding my worldview.
If you try to build a market on strictly unethical practices (such as lying, stealing or cheating) then the law of unintended consequences takes over.
You are entitled to be a fan of unbridled capitalism, I am a fan of fair play.
The beginning of the end is when ethics is forced to take a back seat to the law, particularly law that has become corrupted...
That way of thinking is exactly that which setup the mindset that allowed the Japanese cars to run General Motors into the ground.
One must never surrender values and ethics for the good of abstract economic philosophy. The big lesson I learned fron George Gilder and Milton Friedman is that the "right" path is usually the ethical path as well...
Monopoly tends to be on a different side from freedom and choice, that that is where I am against it.
Microsoft are the liberals.
By supporting them, you support abortion and gun control.
I'm not arguing the divinity of Micrsoft products. I'm arguing against the idea trhat Microsoft is a monopoly. I've encountered great Microsoft products, like Windows 2000. I've also seen my share of crappy Microsoft products, like Exchange, and I've always been free to buy what I like and ignore what I don't like. I'm agnostic about platforms. On my small-office network, I maintain a mix of PC's running Windows (one of them is an IBM ThinkPad), PC's running Linux and an iMac running OS X. I chose each of these systems for its unique set of advantages. So do my customers, which is why I'm frequently called on to get mixtures of machines like this cooperating in networks.
A monopoly exists when, and only when, a corporation inveigles some government into making it illegal to compete with it. An example of a successful monopoly is the healthcare industry. If Microsoft were a real monopoly, I would not have been allowed to set up the Linux PC or the Macintosh. If IBM had been a real monopoly before it, I would have been forced to rent time on a mainframe instead of being able to buy that ThinkPad.
You know, I've been thinking, the only difference between a "conspiracy kook" and everyone else is that the "conspiracy kook" doesn't believe in coincidences.
So, I guess that criteria places me into that much-maligned category.
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