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Is Microsoft Still a Monopoly?
Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop. But in many
other areas,
including Web servers and supercomputing, Microsoft is just one player
among many, and often a weak player at that. On the gaming side,
despite the latest xBox getting all kinds of media buzz as "the"
console to buy, Sony's Playstation outsells the xBox at
least two to one, and many analysts expect Sony to widen that
gap even more when Playstation 3 comes out in the Spring of
2006. On the Internet, MSN and MSN Search are so far behind AOL and
Google that it isn't funny. And even on the desktop, Linux
keeps getting stronger, while Mac OS X is commonly accepted as more
reliable, secure, and user-oriented than Windows. So why do
we keep saying Microsoft is a monopoly?
Microsoft (Slowly) Moves
Away from
Monopolistic Behavior
If a major IT user tells a Microsoft salesperson that he or she is thinking about switching to Linux, Microsoft will usually come back with a cut-price offer, something the company never used to do. Microsoft also now sells something called Windows Starter Edition in some parts of the world -- supposedly for as low as $37 or $38 (US) in Thailand, including a basic version of Microsoft Office. In other words, Microsoft is starting to compete on price, which is not monopoly-style behavior.
This does not mean Microsoft has suddenly adopted a "let's all love one another" attitude.I believe Microsoft is getting more concerned about interoperability not out of goodness, but because of market pressure. But in the long run, as long as Microsoft stops treating every other operating system and file format as some sort of devilspawn, life is a little easier for those of us who would rather not use their products, and that's what really matters.
Microsoft Explorer No Longer Rules the Online World
A majority of desktop computer users may still run Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, but it no longer has 95% market share. In a 2002 book, and again last year in an online article, I warned Web designers not to make IE-only sites, just as in the (distant) past I'd warned them not to make Netscape-only sites. Some listened. Some didn't.
Firefox adoption may have slowed in 2005, but it certainly hasn't stopped. Opera has become enough of a force that we hear rumors about first Google, then Microsoft, buying it. In any case, whether MSIE is currently running on 90% of all desktops or on only 70% (as a few surveys indicate), it is becoming less popular every month. Now Microsoft has decided that Explorer is no longer fit for Mac users, so its market share will drop even more. Sure, there's a new version of Explorer coming out, but it isn't going to help the millions of "legacy" Windows users who don't want to buy XP. If they want modern browser functionality, they must switch to Firefox, Opera or another non-Microsoft browser.
'The Network is the Computer'
I don't think this is quite true today, if by "the network" we're talking about applications delivered over the Internet instead of over well-maintained LANs. Back in October I explained why I don't think Internet-delivered applications are quite "there" yet. More recently, Salesforce.com had an outage that angered many of its (claimed) 350,000 subscribers. Worse, ZDNet blogger Phil Wainewright pointed out that Salesforce.com compounded the problem, and possibly made users leery of all Internet-delivered applications' claims of "99.9% reliability," by poor communication with its users.
Most of the Web 2.0 (and even Web 3.0) stuff that's getting so much hype these days is not OS-dependent. You can run things like Google Maps on Linux, Mac OS, Unix, and even Windows, using any standards-compliant browser you choose.
Even Microsoft is trying to get into the Web 2.0 game. I got a press release from their PR people that included this sentence:"And if you enjoy taking a drive to check out your neighborhood’s Christmas lights visit this great Windows Live Local developer application at http://msnsearch101.com/searchmap."
I found this online utility's behavior strange and primitive, not nearly up to the standards of Google Maps and some of the mashups based on it. "Ah," I thought, "that's probably because I'm trying to use it with Linux and Mozilla." So I turned to my one Windows (XP) computer and checked the site with both Firefox and Explorer. For some reason the map background didn't load at all in Firefox, on Windows, and its behavior in Explorer, on Windows, was just as clunky as it was in Mozilla, on Linux.
If this is supposed to be a sample of what Windows Live Local can do, I don't think Microsoft is headed for any kind of monopoly -- or even much market share -- in the online map business. Not only that, it makes me wonder how good their promised Microsoft® Office Live is going to be. If even a quarter of the rumors we've heard about Google and Sun joining up to produce a Webified version of OpenOffice.org are true, I suspect Microsoft is going to be a distant also-ran in the (inevitable) Internet-delivered office software business, too.
Hundreds of Thousands of Competitors
It's fun to play the "Google is cooler than Microsoft" game and talk about how Google, not Microsoft, has become the hot place for top-end programmers to work if they want to make their mark on the world, but even Google can only hire a tiny fraction of the world's software development talent. There are over 100,000 Open Source projects on SourceForge.net (which is owned by the same company that owns Slashdot), and SourceForge.net is but one of many Open Source and Free Software hosting services out there. There are literally millions of programmers working on Free and Open Source Software, plus countless others working on personal proprietary projects.
We've all heard -- probably too many times -- the old saw, "If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare." This may or may not be true. But it is certain that if you put millions of programmers in front of millions of computers and let them do whatever they want, some of them will turn out brilliant, world-changing work. Even if 999 out of 1000 of our putative programmers work on established projects or never finish what they start, that still gives us thousands of potential world-changing software projects, most of which won't be developed by Google (or Microsoft) employees.
I've been to India, and the smartest programmers I met there weren't working for outsourcing mills but worked for themselves. I'm sure there are plenty of self-employed programmers in China, Brazil, Kenya, and almost everywhere else on this planet, too, and there are certainly plenty of them here in the United States. And, all over the world, millions of programmers have day jobs doing routine work for corporate employers to put food on the table, and do their "real work" at home, at night.
Neither you nor I nor Google's management nor Microsoft's management know what might be going on right now in the mind of a brilliant Saudi woman with a computer science degree who can't work outside her home because her country's laws keep her from mixing with men who aren't related to her. There may be a poorly-dressed young man coding furiously in a Beijing Internet cafe, while you read this article, whose new operating system will make all current ones obsolete -- and you may not learn about his work until it shows up in a Chinese-made $100 laptop computer.
When Bill Gates and his friends started Microsoft, it was one of very few companies that sold nothing but personal computer software, and the others were so small that Microsoft managed to buy most of its competitors -- or at least license their best work or hire away their best programmers. Back then, programmers were scarce and expensive, as were the computers they programmed on. Now there are both programmers and computers all over the world, linked together by the Internet. The Internet not only helps programmers collaborate with each other across geographic boundaries, but allows them to distribute their work without shipping physical products.
The only reason to have a software company's employees work in an office these days is control, both of employees' schedules and of what they work on. Self-motivated geniuses have no need of offices and may even resent being asked to show up at one on a regular schedule, which means that many of the world's best programmers will never work for Google, Microsoft or any other company. Instead, they'll start their own software companies or, in many cases, Open Source-based consultancies.
So Microsoft doesn't face a few dozen competitors, as it did in the 1980s, but hundreds of thousands. And these competitors are spread all over the world. This kind of competition is a lot harder to co-opt, buy out or fend off than competition from a single company, a la Netscape, or even from a group of companies as substantial as IBM, Sun, Oracle, and their computing industry peers.
Competition has Forced Microsoft to Improve its Products
Microsoft may no longer be able to hire all the top programmers it wants, but there is already plenty of talent among its 60,000-plus employees, and they have done some excellent work in recent years. Windows XP is immeasurably better and more stable than Windows ME or Windows 98. The next generation of Explorer will have many of the modern browser features that those of us who use Firefox or Opera have gotten accustomed to. Microsoft Office may not have some of the features OpenOffice.org users take for granted, like a built-in graphics utility, the ability to act as a front end for industrial-strength free databases like MySQL, and the ability to save your work in 30+ different Open and proprietary formats, including PDF. But Microsoft Office today is a lot better than it was 10 years ago, and the next version may even use a sort-of free XML file format that may not be as open and standardized as the OASIS Open Document Format used by OpenOffice.org, but is less closed and less proprietary than previous Microsoft file formats.
A true monopoly would not need to make these improvements in its products. It would give you whatever it wanted, at whatever price it wanted to charge. It would not be selling cut-down versions of its products at cut-rate prices in developing countries -- many of which, you may note, are rapidly turning into "software developing" countries.
Without Linux, combined with Apple's move to BSD-based Mac OS X, I doubt that Microsoft would have put much development effort into Windows. They sure didn't do much with Explorer between the time they crushed Netscape and the time when Firefox started making a big splash, did they?
The U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft wasn't about the company being a monopoly (which courts agreed that it was at the time), but about illegal misuse of that monopoly. That case was settled in a way that left Microsoft essentially unharmed, but with a judge overseeing its actions for five years, a time period that is going to end before long.
The Age of the Software Monopoly is Over
IBM tried to create a monopoly in the business desktop computer business, but failed to hold onto its market-leading position as dozens, then hundreds, and later thousands of competitors made better/faster/cheaper PCs. Even today, while Dell is the world's largest personal computer vendor, if you add up all the market share reports from major computer vendors in this C|Net article, you'll see that they account for around 60% -- not 100% -- of total sales, with smaller companies getting the rest. (And some of those companies are *really* small, like the one-man Bradenton, Florida, shop where my sailing buddy Gene just bought his latest home computer.)
The personal computer hardware business has become totally demonopolized, decentralized, democratized, and internationalized. If you have enough mechanical ability to assemble components neatly (and enough sales ability to get people to buy what you make), you can get into it yourself with a very small investment, just as Michael Dell started out reselling computer components and assembling systems in his college dorm room.
Starting a software business takes even less investment. If you're a competent programmer -- or you have a friend who is a competent programmer and you are a whiz-bang marketing person -- you have everything you need to get going. You can either produce and sell proprietary software or customize (and probably install and maintain) Free or Open Source Software for corporate clients. If the Internet is your primary sales and distribution channel, you don't need to live and work in expensive IT business hotbeds like Silicon Valley or Boston, either: JBoss, for example, is based in Atlanta, Georgia; and Digium, the company behind Asterisk, is in Huntsville, Alabama.
There are software businesses springing up all over the place. Most of them are tiny, and few of them will ever get big enough that analyst firms like Gartner or IDC will track their market share (or even notice them). But there are so many of them being started that, in aggregate, they are becoming a more significant market force than any single big software company, even Microsoft.
This doesn't mean Microsoft will be replaced next year by 100,000 startups. The company will still be around, it will still get lots of press, and -- assuming it embraces (but does not keep trying to extend and extinguish) Open Standards -- it will still be a powerful force in the software world.
But no matter what Microsoft does, it will never have a software monopoly again. Nor will any other company. The barriers to entry in the software business have become too low for that to happen, and too many skilled software developers are learning that they can earn at least as much working for themselves as they would by working for big software companies.
Small is Beautiful was a fine book title in 1973. Today, it's a fine description of the software industry's future.
-----
Have something important to say to the Slashdot community? Email roblimo at slashdot period org the complete article (or an article proposal).
If a major IT user tells a Microsoft salesperson that he or she is thinking about switching to Linux, Microsoft will usually come back with a cut-price offer, something the company never used to do. Microsoft also now sells something called Windows Starter Edition in some parts of the world -- supposedly for as low as $37 or $38 (US) in Thailand, including a basic version of Microsoft Office. In other words, Microsoft is starting to compete on price, which is not monopoly-style behavior.
This does not mean Microsoft has suddenly adopted a "let's all love one another" attitude.I believe Microsoft is getting more concerned about interoperability not out of goodness, but because of market pressure. But in the long run, as long as Microsoft stops treating every other operating system and file format as some sort of devilspawn, life is a little easier for those of us who would rather not use their products, and that's what really matters.
Microsoft Explorer No Longer Rules the Online World
A majority of desktop computer users may still run Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, but it no longer has 95% market share. In a 2002 book, and again last year in an online article, I warned Web designers not to make IE-only sites, just as in the (distant) past I'd warned them not to make Netscape-only sites. Some listened. Some didn't.
Firefox adoption may have slowed in 2005, but it certainly hasn't stopped. Opera has become enough of a force that we hear rumors about first Google, then Microsoft, buying it. In any case, whether MSIE is currently running on 90% of all desktops or on only 70% (as a few surveys indicate), it is becoming less popular every month. Now Microsoft has decided that Explorer is no longer fit for Mac users, so its market share will drop even more. Sure, there's a new version of Explorer coming out, but it isn't going to help the millions of "legacy" Windows users who don't want to buy XP. If they want modern browser functionality, they must switch to Firefox, Opera or another non-Microsoft browser.
'The Network is the Computer'
I don't think this is quite true today, if by "the network" we're talking about applications delivered over the Internet instead of over well-maintained LANs. Back in October I explained why I don't think Internet-delivered applications are quite "there" yet. More recently, Salesforce.com had an outage that angered many of its (claimed) 350,000 subscribers. Worse, ZDNet blogger Phil Wainewright pointed out that Salesforce.com compounded the problem, and possibly made users leery of all Internet-delivered applications' claims of "99.9% reliability," by poor communication with its users.
Most of the Web 2.0 (and even Web 3.0) stuff that's getting so much hype these days is not OS-dependent. You can run things like Google Maps on Linux, Mac OS, Unix, and even Windows, using any standards-compliant browser you choose.
Even Microsoft is trying to get into the Web 2.0 game. I got a press release from their PR people that included this sentence:"And if you enjoy taking a drive to check out your neighborhood’s Christmas lights visit this great Windows Live Local developer application at http://msnsearch101.com/searchmap."
I found this online utility's behavior strange and primitive, not nearly up to the standards of Google Maps and some of the mashups based on it. "Ah," I thought, "that's probably because I'm trying to use it with Linux and Mozilla." So I turned to my one Windows (XP) computer and checked the site with both Firefox and Explorer. For some reason the map background didn't load at all in Firefox, on Windows, and its behavior in Explorer, on Windows, was just as clunky as it was in Mozilla, on Linux.
If this is supposed to be a sample of what Windows Live Local can do, I don't think Microsoft is headed for any kind of monopoly -- or even much market share -- in the online map business. Not only that, it makes me wonder how good their promised Microsoft® Office Live is going to be. If even a quarter of the rumors we've heard about Google and Sun joining up to produce a Webified version of OpenOffice.org are true, I suspect Microsoft is going to be a distant also-ran in the (inevitable) Internet-delivered office software business, too.
Hundreds of Thousands of Competitors
It's fun to play the "Google is cooler than Microsoft" game and talk about how Google, not Microsoft, has become the hot place for top-end programmers to work if they want to make their mark on the world, but even Google can only hire a tiny fraction of the world's software development talent. There are over 100,000 Open Source projects on SourceForge.net (which is owned by the same company that owns Slashdot), and SourceForge.net is but one of many Open Source and Free Software hosting services out there. There are literally millions of programmers working on Free and Open Source Software, plus countless others working on personal proprietary projects.
We've all heard -- probably too many times -- the old saw, "If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare." This may or may not be true. But it is certain that if you put millions of programmers in front of millions of computers and let them do whatever they want, some of them will turn out brilliant, world-changing work. Even if 999 out of 1000 of our putative programmers work on established projects or never finish what they start, that still gives us thousands of potential world-changing software projects, most of which won't be developed by Google (or Microsoft) employees.
I've been to India, and the smartest programmers I met there weren't working for outsourcing mills but worked for themselves. I'm sure there are plenty of self-employed programmers in China, Brazil, Kenya, and almost everywhere else on this planet, too, and there are certainly plenty of them here in the United States. And, all over the world, millions of programmers have day jobs doing routine work for corporate employers to put food on the table, and do their "real work" at home, at night.
Neither you nor I nor Google's management nor Microsoft's management know what might be going on right now in the mind of a brilliant Saudi woman with a computer science degree who can't work outside her home because her country's laws keep her from mixing with men who aren't related to her. There may be a poorly-dressed young man coding furiously in a Beijing Internet cafe, while you read this article, whose new operating system will make all current ones obsolete -- and you may not learn about his work until it shows up in a Chinese-made $100 laptop computer.
When Bill Gates and his friends started Microsoft, it was one of very few companies that sold nothing but personal computer software, and the others were so small that Microsoft managed to buy most of its competitors -- or at least license their best work or hire away their best programmers. Back then, programmers were scarce and expensive, as were the computers they programmed on. Now there are both programmers and computers all over the world, linked together by the Internet. The Internet not only helps programmers collaborate with each other across geographic boundaries, but allows them to distribute their work without shipping physical products.
The only reason to have a software company's employees work in an office these days is control, both of employees' schedules and of what they work on. Self-motivated geniuses have no need of offices and may even resent being asked to show up at one on a regular schedule, which means that many of the world's best programmers will never work for Google, Microsoft or any other company. Instead, they'll start their own software companies or, in many cases, Open Source-based consultancies.
So Microsoft doesn't face a few dozen competitors, as it did in the 1980s, but hundreds of thousands. And these competitors are spread all over the world. This kind of competition is a lot harder to co-opt, buy out or fend off than competition from a single company, a la Netscape, or even from a group of companies as substantial as IBM, Sun, Oracle, and their computing industry peers.
Competition has Forced Microsoft to Improve its Products
Microsoft may no longer be able to hire all the top programmers it wants, but there is already plenty of talent among its 60,000-plus employees, and they have done some excellent work in recent years. Windows XP is immeasurably better and more stable than Windows ME or Windows 98. The next generation of Explorer will have many of the modern browser features that those of us who use Firefox or Opera have gotten accustomed to. Microsoft Office may not have some of the features OpenOffice.org users take for granted, like a built-in graphics utility, the ability to act as a front end for industrial-strength free databases like MySQL, and the ability to save your work in 30+ different Open and proprietary formats, including PDF. But Microsoft Office today is a lot better than it was 10 years ago, and the next version may even use a sort-of free XML file format that may not be as open and standardized as the OASIS Open Document Format used by OpenOffice.org, but is less closed and less proprietary than previous Microsoft file formats.
A true monopoly would not need to make these improvements in its products. It would give you whatever it wanted, at whatever price it wanted to charge. It would not be selling cut-down versions of its products at cut-rate prices in developing countries -- many of which, you may note, are rapidly turning into "software developing" countries.
Without Linux, combined with Apple's move to BSD-based Mac OS X, I doubt that Microsoft would have put much development effort into Windows. They sure didn't do much with Explorer between the time they crushed Netscape and the time when Firefox started making a big splash, did they?
The U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft wasn't about the company being a monopoly (which courts agreed that it was at the time), but about illegal misuse of that monopoly. That case was settled in a way that left Microsoft essentially unharmed, but with a judge overseeing its actions for five years, a time period that is going to end before long.
The Age of the Software Monopoly is Over
IBM tried to create a monopoly in the business desktop computer business, but failed to hold onto its market-leading position as dozens, then hundreds, and later thousands of competitors made better/faster/cheaper PCs. Even today, while Dell is the world's largest personal computer vendor, if you add up all the market share reports from major computer vendors in this C|Net article, you'll see that they account for around 60% -- not 100% -- of total sales, with smaller companies getting the rest. (And some of those companies are *really* small, like the one-man Bradenton, Florida, shop where my sailing buddy Gene just bought his latest home computer.)
The personal computer hardware business has become totally demonopolized, decentralized, democratized, and internationalized. If you have enough mechanical ability to assemble components neatly (and enough sales ability to get people to buy what you make), you can get into it yourself with a very small investment, just as Michael Dell started out reselling computer components and assembling systems in his college dorm room.
Starting a software business takes even less investment. If you're a competent programmer -- or you have a friend who is a competent programmer and you are a whiz-bang marketing person -- you have everything you need to get going. You can either produce and sell proprietary software or customize (and probably install and maintain) Free or Open Source Software for corporate clients. If the Internet is your primary sales and distribution channel, you don't need to live and work in expensive IT business hotbeds like Silicon Valley or Boston, either: JBoss, for example, is based in Atlanta, Georgia; and Digium, the company behind Asterisk, is in Huntsville, Alabama.
There are software businesses springing up all over the place. Most of them are tiny, and few of them will ever get big enough that analyst firms like Gartner or IDC will track their market share (or even notice them). But there are so many of them being started that, in aggregate, they are becoming a more significant market force than any single big software company, even Microsoft.
This doesn't mean Microsoft will be replaced next year by 100,000 startups. The company will still be around, it will still get lots of press, and -- assuming it embraces (but does not keep trying to extend and extinguish) Open Standards -- it will still be a powerful force in the software world.
But no matter what Microsoft does, it will never have a software monopoly again. Nor will any other company. The barriers to entry in the software business have become too low for that to happen, and too many skilled software developers are learning that they can earn at least as much working for themselves as they would by working for big software companies.
Small is Beautiful was a fine book title in 1973. Today, it's a fine description of the software industry's future.
-----
Have something important to say to the Slashdot community? Email roblimo at slashdot period org the complete article (or an article proposal).
This is the most obivious troll bullfuckingshit ever posted on this site.
since when you do fucking linux nerds care about market share and money? you have neither
lololol
Microsoft was declared a monopoly by a court in 1999, but I'm not sure if they ever fit the dictionary definition of monopoly as the submitter seems to now be holding them to:
Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service
Did Microsoft ever have exclusive control of the desktop? Sure, they had a vast majority, but exclusive control? To my knowledge, nothing ever stopped anyone from buying a Mac or running IBM's OS/2 or Linux or any other number of alternatives. I think we can all agree that Microsoft engaged in cut-throat tactics and was legally declared a monopolist but I don't think they exactly fit the dictionary definition.
A monster ate my homework!
How about getting rid of the Microsoft Tax on new computers as well? They may not be a monopoly anymore but why should I pay more for a computer that I don't want Windows installed on?
Microsoft is first and foremost a PC company, and in that area, where Windows still has 90% marketshare and Microsoft dictates which technologies will make it, Microsoft is still a monopoly. Just because they don't have the same kind of influence in other markets doesn't mean that times are changing...it just means Microsoft hasn't had the time to create monopolies there yet.
The company has over 90% market share in several segments, and has been tried and convicted of using the monopolistic powers *illegally*. The summary "why do we keep calling Microsoft a monopoly?" is silly. The article could easily have been written by a Microsoft lawyer. The headline looks to be fit for Fox News.
S
Monopoly is NOT about market share. If a product has a large market share it doesn't mean it is monopolizing the market. Monopolizing refers to the manner of conducting business which hurts other competitors.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
But in many other areas, including Web servers and supercomputing, Microsoft is just one player among many, and often a weak player at that.
Or areas like donuts, fire hydrants, day care, and garbage trucks.
To get a non MS operating system from any major computer vendor and see a monopoly in action.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
It's damn hard to run a 50-person business without Microsoft software. It's next to impossible to do so when you scale up to 100, 1000, or 10,000 people. This alone makes them a de facto monopoly as far as I'm concerned.
Maybe because by the time the justice department did anything about it, it was too little, too late.
Maybe people still call them a monopoly to make Microsoft aware that they have alot of work to do yet in order to work with the industry instead of against it.
Maybe because people know that if left unchecked and unwatched, they would lobby against open standards and fair use.
Maybe because people still think of them as evil and Microsoft does little but to reinforce this belief.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Microsoft is a de facto monopolist in certain markets, including the consumer desktop and many corporates. The monopoly has been handed them on a plate and they have, of course, taken it. In 1988 when I bought my first Mac, there was a bewildering array of word processors. Now there is only one, and Open Office has to copy or die. The browser share of IE is effectively 100% among non-technical users - a de facto monopoly. The market share of Windows among non-technical/specialist consumers is as near 100% as makes no odds.
At the root of this is the simple fact that computers are too difficult for Joe Public and are likely always to be so. Enough people kind of understand how Windows and its apps works that Joe Public can kind of keep things working most of the time. There is simply not the expertise out there to support multiple platforms all with significant market shares. And so long as Microsoft can keep technically competent people busy with release updates, virus checking, feature bloat resulting in user support calls for things they do not really need to do at all...it will continue.
So the answer to your post is that yes, lots of things - lack of knowledge, fear of the unknown, lack of support, existential doubt - stopped many people from buying alternatives and those things are not going away any time soon.
Pining for the fjords
Not really. If you read the article, Rob's points are pretty clear. The point isn't whether Microsoft is filled with goodness and light, but whether they actually exert monopoly power now, in December, 2005. I'm no Microsoft fan, but I have to agree with Rob. There is increasing competition in operating systems, Microsoft has been forced to change its pricing in response to the rise of Linux, and Office is facing new threats that are small right now but could be huge in a year or two.
Microsoft has had a difficult time leveraging its dominance in operating systems and office software. Look at the long uphill battle they've had with the XBox. Their record with media ventures is mixed at best. They're locked in a heated struggle with Google, and in the mean time Yahoo! is stealing a march on MSN.
Rob's piece goes against the conventional Slashdot wisdom, but it makes sense. Many Slashdotters have been arguing for some time that Microsoft reached its peak and is on a downhill slide. MS can't exert monopoly power and simultaneously be losing its grip on the industry. The times are changing. Now the question is, if Microsoft really no longer calls the shots in the industry, what does that mean for the other players like Red Hat, IBM, Apple, and Dell?
p.s. - Would any piece stating Microsoft is no longer a monopoly incur a "that was written by a Microsoft attorney" slur?
p.p.s. - What does Fox News have to do with any of this?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It's been a while since I read an apologia for Microsoft and the assertion that it is not a monopoly. Despite the author's claims, Microsoft still engages in monopolistic practices- including one that is erroneously described as a non-monopolistic practice, which is undercutting the competition whenever possible. The original article uses a too-narrow definition of "monopoly" and then mischaracterizes classic monopolistic practices as non-monopolistic practices. The only reason to do this is to distort reality into a shape mroe to Bill Gates's liking.
OK, I will declare Microsoft "not a monopoly", in my opinion, the day that I can:
1) Walk in to any major retail chain and purchase an X86 computer
2) Without MS-Windows
3) At a significantly lower price than the same/similar model without MS-Windows
It doesn't really matter what the most "proper" definition of a monopoly is, Microsoft fits it, regardless. How would you feel if you went to buy a car and found that every car on every lot had a Sony casette radio in it? Not only did you have no other choices, you are charged the same or MORE if you try to get a car without a Sony casette radio! Sure, you could rip it out and install something else, but Sony gets your money no matter what... money that you could have used on something else. And the whole radio market suffers because of being stomped on by Sony.
Your telling me that said "mom and pop" store can get me volume pricing like Dell can? My point is why can't I just get a stripped down computer from Dell for a little cheaper, instead of having to go to a Mom and Pop store and pay more for the parts and labour? I don't think they would be willing to offer me $500 bucks for a full system with no O/S installed. Is there no easy solution to this problem that Microsoft has created?
Microsoft has not created the problem, *consumers* have created the problem. Consumers chose DOS over Mac and OS/2 1.x. Consumers chose Windows over OS/2 2.x. Consumers have voted with their wallet for computer vendors that provide the lowest prices. As you indicate these low prices are brought about by volume discounts. The per CPU charge is part of the deal that vendors *chose*. Why did they choose this, because 99.x% of customers *want* MS products and this gives them the lower prices that consumers demand.
You can be religious or cheap. If you want to be a purist then buy from Mom and Pop. Not only will your conscience be clean but you will be supporting *local* business. If you do not like the large corporation's bottom line decision making and their ignoring of minority market segments do not do business with them! Do business with the small local shops that are more responsive to your personal situation and minority market segments. To continue with the "consumers are doing it to themselves theme": Customer focused Mom and Pop shops are not being killed off by WalMart, they are being killed off by *consumers* that choose to shop at WalMart. It's the same in many markets/industries.
Let's list some of them.
This article reads as if somebody drafted it while drunk and didn't bother reading through it afterwards or refine it in any way. I feel sad that people are getting paid for this drivel. Slashdot, it's good that you are attempting to be more than the linkathon you've been in recent years, what with Zonks articles and this, but that doesn't mean you can publish any old drivel and expect people to lap it up. Some thought has to go into it.
Then YES. Microsoft is a fucking monopoly.
Microsoft owns the Desktop computing market.
They've never had a monopoly anywhere else. If you were an enterprise user, you DID have alternatives to NT and IIS. It wasn't always Linux, but there were alternatives.
However, at any point between Windows 95 and XP did you EVER have the option of buying a PC that was dual boot linux/beOS/AtheOS/*BSD/INsert OS of choice AND Windows? No? Guess what then? That's a monopoly.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
He asked for volume product availability that a company like Dell can provide but mom and pop stores and DIY solutions can't begin to address.
Your answer is typical of solo techies who post on Slashdot, college students or working programmers or technosavvy others who extrapolate their personal, home computing experience to the entire world.
Someone who needs to get 50, or 500, or 5000 standardized desktops and be able to image the hard disks as they require is going to have to negotiate a sales deal with a reasonably large and stable company like Dell. It's not reasonable to expect them to try to save $50/machine on the Windows "tax" by going to the corner computer store or even a slightly larger local systems integrator who may or may not be around in a couple of years when the desktops need servicing or replacement.
It's also not reasonable to expect non-technical end users out there in the mass consumer market to go to the corner store, have a machine put together to their specifications, and then run the Fedora or Ubuntu setup DVD. That's simply not going to happen, much less ask them to "buy the parts, screw them together", etc.
In reality, Microsoft has a lock on both the mass market and the business market, leaving only the fringe technosavvy customers and Mac lovers to use the alternatives. MS is using their power as any other business would, locking the manufacturers into a Windows-only offering that ignorant customers go along with.
But just wait. As Linux continues to improve, it will become a bargaining chip for manufacturers to force down the Windows tax if not eliminate it entirely. It's not quite yet time for Dell and Gateway and HP to tell Microsoft they're switching to 50% Linux, but that day may not be far in the future.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
It still exists as if I go to Best Buy, Dell, Circuit City and others I MUST buy Microsoft on the products presented and their is not an option to exclude it. Dell is showing a crack in the M$ armor though, I believe you can get a very high ended desktop with Linux. But I think most Linux users want something less than $1000.
This means it is a monopolistic practice called "bundling". Even though it is against the law in the US, it is not enforced.
Not only is Microsoft still a monopoly (you don't have to be a monopoly in everything to be a monopoly, Standard Oil and Bell only dominated one defined area) and WORSE than this they are a monopoly who uses that position to effectively engage in "dumping" on other segments by using monopoly revenues to subsidise new businesses. This is also against most trading rules but oddly MS get away with it.
XBox is the perfect case in point, they continue to push a non-profitable model using subsidies from the parent company in order to get to a market dominant position where they will make a profit.
God knows how this is WTO compliant let alone compliant with US and European business rules.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I'd agree that MS is losing a lot of the "power" that owning the desktop used to give them, but not for many of the reasons cited there.
I think, rather, "the desktop" has just becoming less important.
It's not just about who has the best search engine, either. Yahoo's *integration* of messenger, email, a friendster-style network, blogging, email/webforum groups, customized homepage, etc. is more impressively useful than whatever OS and browser I choose to access those things.
Or rather, all those sorts of things combined are becoming more of what I consider "my operating system" to be than my wallpaper or even the contents of my local hard drive.
Google is on a slightly different path, but headed in the same direction, I think. I use gmail, blogger, googlenews, google maps - their integration is pretty terrible compared to Yahoo's - as is MS' integration of the piecemeal "online apps" that it has picked up - but google's stuff just seems to work better for me and I'm already there. Whereas Yahoo's implementation is almost compelling enough to get me to switch over to it wholesale, MS is doin' what now?
Jeff Freeman
Micorsoft is a monopoly -- they have been found so in both the EU and US. They still have a stranglehold on corporate and home desktops, and produce the only office productivity software that you can use in a lot of business environments.
There is nothing wrong or illegal about being a monopoly. If you make the best baskets and control 90 percent of the market, then good on you. What is illegal is using your dominant position in one market to abuse another. If, for example, you colluded with vendors to make sure your baskets were the only ones buyers saw, or forced vendors to pay you even for every basket sold that wasn't yours, or that (for some inexplicable reason) your baskets could only hold fruit from your orchards -- that would be illegal.
So the question more properly is: Is Microsoft sill abusing its monopoly position?
The answer would appear to be that they're trying awfully hard to. Rather than giving existing security vendors more transparent help, they're building (buying) their own AV and security units. We'll see what it looks like in Longvista I guess, but it sure sound to me like using their OS monopoly to leverage a position in the security market.
Sounds kinda like what they did with WMP -- not because they care about the player but because they want to own the format. More leveraging the OS to squeeze into another market. Feel free to use whatever media player you want, but you'll need their proprietary codec from WMP (free download!) to play all the Super Media Content (TM) (which will, of course, require DRM licenses and other license fees from producers who use the format; you'll have paid for them in your Genuine Windows(TM) License). They don't want the player, they want the pipe -- and the OS can help them lock it up.
MS says they will move Office documents to xml to allow for interoperability, but not to the specification that they helped write. They will open the format to a degree slightly less than their customers want and the law requires, and deal will legal consequences as standard operating costs. Same song different decade. Bill don't care as long as those $400/seat licenses keep rolling in,
MS certainly has more competition these days, in every area the tentacles have expanded. However, it still has its original monopoly in PC desktop operating systems (and office productivity software), and is still actively leveraging that position to help itself in other markets.
Other than that there are hardly any apps for it? The findings of fact in United States v. Microsoft based its case largely on an "applications barrier to entry".
Pretty poor case then.
IBM: Charged over $300 for the basic SDK (at a time when MS was giving it to anyone that looked like a developer), and basically treated 3rd party OS/2 development as a special privilege that developers should be grateful for.
Apple: Open with the tools, but quick to pull the rug out from under peoples feet. Apple has a long and continuing history of screwing over all 3rd party support for Mac (any 3rd party [with the exception of the 800lbs gorillas, Microsoft and Adobe] that rises to the rank of minor idol in the cult of Mac is quickly struck down; thou shall have no god but Apple) - hardware developers, software developers, even the dealers (who currently have a class action suit against Apple for multiple ugly tactics used against it's own certified Mac dealers)
Linux: An open and free desktop standard to develop on, all 583 of them. Even today Linux still needs a common, practical windowing API to really get developers and take the desktop. Back in 1999 it was far worse.
Applications barrier to entry? Microsoft can't help it if all it's competition is either incompentent, power mad or disorganized.
There is a VERY easy solution. Don't buy from people who make you buy Microsoft products. It's not a problem, you have had this option all the time. In fact, it is CHEAPER.
For you and I it isn't much of a problem to find such a vendor, what about when you need to buy for an enterprise? What if you need several thousand computers in differens states or countries and you need reliable hardware support?
What choices do you have? To buy from several small mfgs? To pay higher prices because you're not doing the volume with one dealer?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Depending on the exact semantics you choose for the definition of 'monopoly' you may be correct. But an interesting corrolary is that our government does work to create artificial monopolies by granting patents. A patent is just a temporary, government assigned monopoly on a limited domain. But in practice, patents help propogate large monopolies by working to favor large, established companies with plenty of resources for filing patents, litigating over patents, defending patent lawsuits, etc.
Software patents are especially bad in this regard, since they tend to be overly broad and abstract. In essense, the USPTO is now allowing one individual to *own* an idea, which is - IMO - ludicrous. Reform (or eliminate) the patent system and let companies compete on real merits (customer service, product quality, support, speed of delivery, whatever) and we would be making a strong step towards eliminating harmful monopolies.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
The Economist recently had an article discussing Microsoft and the X-Box360, relating to the topic of innovation and monopoly.
They note that Micrsoft only appears to show it's "hidden ability" to innovate when forced to compete in sectors in which it has no monopoly.
"There is another explanation, of course. It is surely no coincidence that Microsoft's hidden ability to innovate has become apparent only in a market in which it is the underdog and faces fierce competition. Microsoft is far less innovative in its core businesses, in which it has a monopoly (in Windows) and a near monopoly (in Office). But in new markets of gaming, mobile devices and television set-top boxes, Microsft has been unable to exploit its Windows monopoly other than indirectly - it has financed the company's expensive forways into pastures new. Indeed, with mobile phones and set-top boxes, Microsoft's reputation as a monopolist counted against it, and it was, in effect, frozen out for many years. So it has had to find other ways into those markets, including -shock, horror- innovation in both technology and marketing."
The article is "The Meaning of Xbox", from the November 26th issue.
Seriously, it seems that we go through this discussion every few months.
At least read the court decision. Microsoft was ruled to have a monopoly in the x86 desktop market.
Not in game consoles.
Not in the server market.
Not in the ISP market.
You just happened to forget the fact that you don't have to buy anything from Microsoft to develop .NET apps. .NET framework that includes command-line compilers (C#, VB.Net, JS.Net). If you want managed C++, there is (freeware again) Visual C++ Toolkit 2003).
.NET apps? Certainly. Is it required? No.
You only have to download freely available
All mentioned products contain compilers and libraries. Documentation is available on msdn.microsoft.com, and you don't even have to register with Microsoft for that.
Visual Studio is just an IDE and bunch of tools. Does it help to develop
Rediculous is ridiculous!
Wonderful use of language in an effort to change perceptions.
MSFT isnt a Monopoly. They are a predatory abusive monopoly. Yes they are still abusing their market position as the 80% marketshare of their inferior legacy IE shows. They are still trying to abuse their marketshare as their abuse of the ECMA standards group with their draconian MS Word document format shows. They are still dumping inferior outdated products to the point where only Open Source produced by the good will of comopanies and individuals programming at home proves.
The exact market share of MSFT is not as important as their abuse of their marketshare which hinders inovation, economic growth freedom and democracy. Come back when MSFT does not have a position to abuse. Then we can talk.
Seriously, why would a modern computer manufactuer sell a computer that would force users to reboot in order to switch tasks? It's a tideous processs and most computer users would hate it. If one of the OSes will do most of what users wants (and therefore make rebooting unnecessary), then that OS will be enough for 99% of their customers. Those who do take advantage of the dual boot option will be confused/infuriated with not having their profiles/settings persist in both environments. Chances are the 1% who do want a dual boot system would end up nuking the system and setting it up themselves.
Most computer users want something easy and simplistic. Dual booting is not. In order to get it to that point a company would have to spend thousands to millions of dollars in software development, which in turn would rase the cost of the computer hundreds to thousands of dollars. Think of most of the computer users you know. Who among them would pay that much extra for a dual boot system?
Everybody talks about the OS as the lock-in for business, but it's really MS Office. So long as Office only runs in a predictable way under Windows and cannot BY DEFAULT interact seamlessly with any other app, Microsoft retains the monopoly. Businesses really don't care about the OS, what they care about is their intellectual output looking "right" without a hitch. Anybody who has dealt with the bloody mess that results from a Mac Office to PC Office conversion knows that real interoperability is a distant dream. And since "everybody" runs Office, Office and Windows become the only choice.
= 20051216153153504
Which is why killing widespread support for the Open Document Format is Microsoft's primary goal right now. You can see how MS freaked when the state of Massachusetts mandated *support* for ODF. Not that MS had to use it by default, they just had to read and write it. Not a big deal, but MS recognized it as the thin edge of the wedge for erosion of their desktop domination, and began all kinds of political dirty tricks to overturn the decision. This obscure corner of policy may be the most important fight about electronic freedom in this country.
Here's the Wiki article, read it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
Learn more here: http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page
Well.... Even by the dictionary definition, Microsoft has a monopoly over Windows-compatible operating systems. The problem becomes generalizing to a greater market.
Lets say, for example, that we still had Mobile Oil. Lets say that a few people sold, say, biodiesel through alternative channels. Does this make Mobile less of a monopoly from the standpoint of the economic control that they have?
IANAL, but I think that a monopoly is defined legally in the US as a company that can effectively set the prices of their products without regard to external market forces. For example, one might be said to have a sugar monopoly when one could, say, double the price of sugar without causing an appreciable number of customers to switch to an alternative. The fact that Microsoft comes back with discounts when you threaten to switch to a competitor indicates that they are doing exactly that-- setting the prices of their products without regard to external market forces. But it also means that they are now in a position where *occasionally* this doesn't work so well. So this price-cutting behavior seems to me both evidence of monopolistic behavior on Microsoft's part and evidence of the demise of their power at the same time.
Sure, they had a vast majority, but exclusive control? To my knowledge, nothing ever stopped anyone from buying a Mac or running IBM's OS/2 or Linux or any other number of alternatives. I think we can all agree that Microsoft engaged in cut-throat tactics and was legally declared a monopolist but I don't think they exactly fit the dictionary definition.
The lawyers I hang out with are usually quick to point out that legalese is sort of like a separate language. However, here is another way to look at it. Microsoft is effectively a monopoly when *most people* believe that they have *effectively* no choice but to use Microsoft software.
Now having market power/monopoly power is not a crime. Boeing for years had a complete monopoly on extremely large passenger aircraft (i.e. the 747). Was this illegal? No. It would have been illegal only if they had used this monopoly to force other competitors out of the market (i.e. "if you buy any planes from Airbus, we won't sell you 747's"). Indeed there is nothing even evil about being a monopoly. The only issue is that we have to hold them to a higher standard of behavior due to the greater capacity they have for damaging our economy.
The problem with Microsoft is that they gained their market power through anticomepetitive means, maintained it through anticomepetitive means and hence have harmed everyone else in the process. When I became aware of the horribly unethical business practices of Microsoft, it made me ill. I worked there at the time, and I was reading about the AARD code and other absolutely unjustifiably anticomeptitive acts that Microsoft did in the years prior.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
selling your development tools at a loss is something Microsoft could afford to do given their grip on the OS market. Just like they have been able to lose over $8billion keeping WindowsCE afloat. That goes for the billions lost on the Xbox over the last 3-4 years. I wont even go into how Microsoft pilfered Borlands top developers, threatened Watcom if they shipped another foundation class along with MFC, etc, etc, etc, etc.
That doesnt sound like poor work on Microsofts competitors side to me. You know Borland was actually making a pretty good living selling $99 compilers and even $250 dev IDE kit too. But when they started supporting OS/2, Microsoft decided it was Borlands time to go.
History can be read many ways but I dont trust it when a large amount of fact is left out of the big picture. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The fact that Microsoft comes back with discounts when you threaten to switch to a competitor indicates that ... external market forces are coming to bear on its stratospheric profit margin. Nothing more.
Intersting take on that. I would suggest the opposite is true... that would be that Microsoft has such a grip on the OS market precisely because it sells its development tools at a loss. Seriously, have you ever developed software for the windows environment? I don't know if they could make it any easier. And that ease translates into software...lots of it.
Let me give you an example; today I needed to download a program that could convert between avi formats. I have no doubt that there are programs to do this on an Apple and in Linux. For windows there were countless apps, most available for free to accomplish this task. This is just one of many reasons that I haven't made the switch.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
*Microsoft* (not IBM) charged over US$1000 for the OS/2 1.x SDK back before the IBM/MS split, and they ended up screwing over a large number of potential OS/2 developers by announcing and then never releasing the last version. IBM's independent OS/2 efforts had to overcome the bad taste MS left in the mouths of developers, which made an otherwise difficult selling job even harder.
Microsoft also withheld developer resources and key Windows programming information from companies that were doing cross-platform application development.
US$300 means nothing to even a small business developer, but losing access to key developer programs can really hurt in a competitive market.
Not only did Windows have an advantage in terms of the number of applications available for it, but MS went out of its way to ensure that folks who were developing key apps for Windows kept their apps only on Windows.
WordPerfect 5.x for OS/2 died in the late beta stages as a direct result of MS actions, as did several OS/2Windows development tools like those developed by Borland and Micrografx.
Whether or not the conduct was illegal isn't too important -- the fact of the matter is that MS was quite proactive in screwing over its competition.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.