Slashdot Mirror
Opera CTO Thinks IE Will Be Forced To Support SVG
Julie188 writes "Opera Software is, as expected, preening over the forthcoming browser ballot box feature in Windows 7. It will put the Opera name in front of millions of users who probably never heard of it. But that's not the only reason Opera is gloating. CTO Håkon Wium Lie feels that today's decision will force Microsoft to make Internet Explorer do a better job of supporting standards, particularly the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Lie would also like to see Apple and Linux makers follow suit with browser ballot boxes of their own."
Thank you. I am so happy to see you write this, and to see Slashdot moderators recognize it as an important point.
Obviously there is significant tension between capital and the market: capitalists always want to circumvent or break the market in order to stave off competitions' downward pressure on profits. But until reading Fernand Braudel's fascinating Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century (I haven't yet finished), I was unaware how far back this antagonism went. Illegal international monopolies on vital goods were a problem in the 17th century just as they are today. In fact, opposition to the market was baked right in to the birth of capitalism.
Capitalism arose where there was a need for capital and a potential for large profits. Originally, this was in long-distance trade, where large outlays of money (for ships and goods) and long turn-around times meant both significant risk and huge profits (hundreds of percent in many cases). Capitalists were traders. They simply weren't interested in other areas: for a long time they did not expand significantly beyond a few specialized activities making up a small part of the overall economy.
The market, on the other hand, actually existed in physical marketplaces. This was where producers of goods (e.g. peasants from the countryside) came to sell them. Then traders started to interfere. These traders would go out of the city and buy up the goods directly from producers. These they would bring them into the city, where they could charge a higher price because they had consolidated the supply and thus were less vulnerable to market competition. This practice was actually illegal: governments banned it in order to protect consumers. (In those days spending over half your income on food - and still starving - was not unusual, so one can imagine why even pre-democratic monarchies would want to make sure people could afford bread.)
So yeah, capitalism is one thing. The market is another. And there is great tension between them.
The pinnacle of capitalism then, as now, was finance. As soon as they could, these early capitalists got out of trade. It was too risky, and it was socially looked down upon. They insisted on a distinction between ordinary merchants, who actually did the work, and more prestigious deal-makers who only provided money. The moment they could, they placed themselves in the second group where they could make tremendous low-risk profits in finance, and pretend that neither they nor their ancestors had ever been merchants at all.