Annual Cost of Microsoft Monopoly: $10 Billion

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's deals with major PC vendors lock users out from alternative options, such as Linux. A recent whitepaper calculates that the cost to industry of this Microsoft monopoly is $10 billion per year."

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The Slashdot Bandwagon

[Boing]

I'm normally not one to point out examples of groupthink in this community. By and large, we have our biases same as every other discussion group that's ever existed.

But: every time there's a new study on how "piracy costs the music industry N dollars", where N is the estimated number of piracy incidents times the average suggested retail price of the pirated materials, there is universal outrage. "That's fallacious," we cry, "it assumes that every incident of piracy would have otherwise been a retail purchase at full price!". And we are right to make that claim.

However, here's a study that exercises a similar fallacy, and yet the outrage goes in the other direction. (and yes, I know this doesn't apply to everyone... I'm generalizing).

We can't assume, if the major vendors decided to stop bundling Windows/Office tomorrow, that any significant number of people would happily explore alternative options and be just as satisfied.

We can't assume, had Microsoft gone belly-up nine years ago, that people would have been perfectly content to start figuring out monitor sync rates and which filesystems with which to partition and format their hard drives.

We can't assume that all the unwashed masses would've just gone to Apple; we can't assume they would've been able to afford it; we can't assume Apple's products would've advanced at the rate they have without the pressure of being the "underdog". And since the premise of this "study" (though I am loathe to call it that) is that of the cost of a monopoly, we can't assume Apple (or Linux, or whatever) "winning" the market would've been any better.

Like it or not, Microsoft's presence and market dominance is an inextricable part of computing history. There is no way of even remotely predicting how the last twenty years would have panned out without it. And despite its grandiose claims, the authors of this article don't even seem to have bothered trying.