The same logic would say the same thing about the tabacco industry. It doesn't matter if it kills thousands of people because Joe Sixpack would lose his job at the plant?
The tobacco industry hasn't killed anyone. Almost everyone who smokes is completely aware that their habit is likely to cause cancer and they do it anyway. They rational adults who are excercising their freedom of choice.
The tobacco industry has decieved people a few times, and they should be held liable for that. But the simple act of selling cigarattes is not and should not be considered unethical. It is not the job of a business to second-guess the choices of his customers, nor does he have anything to feel guilty about if a smoker (assuming the smoker is aware of the dangers of smoking) dies of cancer. The fundamental issue here is that people should be responsible for their actions-- cigarettes don't light themselves.
Secondly, money represents resources. When you say that some policy will cost a certain amount of money, that means that it prevents a certain amount of societal resources from being used for other purposes. Specifically, fuel-efficient cars will require more labor and more natural resources than gas-powered cars. So are you are saying that those extra resources should be expended no matter how many they are?
The point is not that gas-powered cars are intrinsically evil. Any means of transportation is going to cause pollution somplace. The trick it to make sure that the costs you impose on others is fully accounted for in the price of the goods and services you buy.
Taxing people thousands of dollars for driving fuel-inefficient cars is excessive. The issues isn't fuel economy (since people pay for the full price of fuel) but pollution. A tax on cars with poor fuel economy might be reasonable.
Secondly, the point is to make sure people take into account the full cost of their actions, rather than to punish people who commit the "evil" act of using an internal combustion engine. Therefore the punative nature of your post is inappropriate. Expecting someone to pay 15 grand to drive a car that gets 10 MPG is absurd, and is far out of proportion to the costs such a car imposes on the rest of us. Do a little research before imposing your values on the rest of us.
How many *more* people will be dependant on these resources then?
As oil wells start going dry, the price will begin to rise, and people will start shifting to alternative fuels. In addition, higher prices will lead to more R & D into new oil sources. Together these two factors will ensure a smooth and gradual transition to other energy sources.
How much more pain will be inflicted as a result?
Much less than if we start forcing people to use more expensive technologies now, when technology is less advanced and when the future of our oil supply is uncertain. People have been predicting the imminent depletion of oil supplies for decades. It hasn't happened yet, and may not happen for decades to come. It'll be much easier to switch to alternative fuels in 2050 than it is today.
How much more environmental degradation will both the consuming and the supplying nations suffer?
If you're talking about just the result of pollution, I don't there are any technologies that will eliminate that altogether. Solar and wind are not practical ways to power a car, and hybrid and electricity cars still use electricity, which in many cases is generated by burning fossil fuels. And cars these days are much cleaner than they were 20 years ago.
We *will* run our of petroleum some day.
No, we won't. There are two reasons for this. First, we keep finding new sources. The fact that oil is still below its price in the 70's tells us that it's still relatively plentiful. Secondly, if we ever do start to run out, the shortages will drive up prices which will curtail usage and preserve the reserves for the most urgent functions. There will be an assymptotic relationship: the closer we get to the "last barrel," the higher the price will go.
In practice, we will probably never hit that point, since as prices go up people will switch to alternatives and there will always be some available. Let the market work-- it will ensure a transition when it's needed, without imposing unnecessary costs when they are not needed.
There is an extremely simple and effective way to ensure there will always be gasoline available when it's needed: prices.
If you are right that we have a decade of gasoline left, then gas prices will rise steadily throughout the next decade. By the end of the decade (when gas is almost gone) prices will be so high that no one will be able to afford it, and so alternative fuel sources will be adopted out of necessity.
In practice, there isn't a single reservoir of oil, so there's never a point at which we "run out." It will simply get more and more expensive to extract, and as prices rise people will switch to other fuels.
It's worth pointing out that prior to the current spike, gas was at the lowest price in history. That's evidence that if anything oil supplies are more plentiful than at any other time in history. People have been predicting the imminent end of oil supplies since the 30's. But to raise the price now on the (likely false) assumption that it's going to run out quickly is as wrong-headed as lowering the price on the assumption that supplies will last forever.
Let the market work. As supplies get tight, prices will go up, and people will use alternative fuels. People in the future will have better alternatives than we do today, anyway, so it would be foolish for us to spend a lot of money rationing oil now when there might be a breakthrough in 10 years that makes oil obsolete.
Granting all of the above, this was still an amazing feat-- the 68k-to-PPC transition is the only time that a major consumer architecture transitioned to new processor without many consumers even noticing.
The 840 was discontinued in '94. The 9500 was introduced in '95. That means that the period of stagnation was only a year. And by the end of '96 almost all major apps had been re-written to be native, meaning that that 9500 was much faster a year after its introduction than the 840.
One year of performance stagnation is a small price to pay considering that it allowed Apple to abandon a creaking architecture and has allowed the Mac to surpass the competition with the G3. Now it's admittedly lagging behind again, but you can bet it would be much worse if we were still stuck the 68k chips.
I shudder to think what would happen if MS tried to pull the same trick.
I was not aware they didn't invent IE, but I don't see that it matters. IE 1 was a really shitty product. The impressive innovations I've seen have been the last couple versions, since they caught up to and surpassed Netscape in features and performance. You don't have to invent something from the ground up for it to count as an innovation. Improving a product in small ways is innovating as well.
I find the arrogance of the anti-Microsoft bigots on this forum appalling. Are you seriously saying that no reasonable person could disagree with you? That's absurd. Antitrust law is a complex enough and controversial enough law that there is room for reasonable disagreement on both sides. If you don't agree with me, fine. Let's hear your arguments. But attacking my motives or my integrity does nothing to further the discussion.
Of course opinion enters it. To say otherwise would be to say that Judge Jackson is infallible, which he clearly isn't. I disagree with both his premises (about how antitrust should be applied) and some of his specific conclusions (such as his definition of what a monopoly is) These are sufficiently complicated issues that it's ridiculous to say that once Jackson weighs in on the issue no dissent from that opinion is possible.
After all, it's a "matter of public record" that OJ was not guilty. Do you believe that too?
Well, buying a product and integrating it into their other products is a sort of innovation in itself, since it requires a good eye to what will be successful. Same is true of their marketing and distribution methods.
Not only that, but they *have* produced some products in-house. IE is the best example. I don't know about the Windows side, but the Mac version of IE 5 kicks ass. I generally don't like Microsoft's products, but this is one product that I think is far superior to the alternatives.
I think people here have a too-narrow notion of innovation. No, Microsoft hasn't produced anything on the order of the modern GUI or OO programming. But it has performed thousands of relentless innovations that have made their products gradually better. It is precisely these small innovations that are threatened by the government. If Microsoft has to justify every feature and change to the government, they likely will be extremely timid about making changes.
How do you figure? If they can make a competing product at a lower price, which shouldn't they? Isn't that what competition all about? You can look at it as an "unfair advantage," but nowhere is it written that competition has to be fair in the sense that a baseball game is fair.
The purpose of a market is to produce the best products at the lowest price. If MS is able to produce products for less than anyone else, I see that as a boon to consumers. I think it's ridiculous that people are *complaining* that IE is "too cheap." If you want Netscape, go ahead and use it.
It would be ridiculous to guaruntee that every business will make a profit. When you go into business, one of the risks you take is that a bigger company will come along and outcompete you in the marketplace. It sucks for you, but it's a boon to consumers. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
It's a matter of court record that Microsoft is a "monopolistic bully".
It's Judge Jackson's opinion. I don't share it.
In brief, it's illegal to use one monopoly to acquire another, different monopoly. What part of that is hard to understand?
You want a list?
The definition of "monopoly" is extremely unclear. The precised definition depends on how you define the relevant market, which in practice is a largely arbitrary decision.
IE is far from a monopoly. Which monopoly did MS get?
The above is (again) the current interpretation of the law. Again, the interpretation changes with time. For example, I don't remember Standard Oil ever using one monopoly to gain another.
The law is spottily enforced. After all, Apple has a monopoly on Macintosh computers, and they are now using that monopoly to increase market share for ClarisWorks and Final Cut. Should the DoJ step in there?
It is not at all clear what constitutes "using" a monopoly. After all, there are clear technical advantages to integrating an app with an OS. How do you tell which integrations are "good" and which are "bad?"
You might have answers to all of the above questions, but the fact is that the answers change with each prosecutor, and are therefore it is impossible to know for sure which actions will be declared illegal. Most of the things Microsoft is not faulted for would not have been thought illegal by many antitrust lawyers in the 1980's.
That's pretty hard to do when their own emails show that they did it for competitive advantage.
Of course they did it for "competitive advantage." Everything every company does is for competitive advantage. That's what's perverse about antitrust law-- things that are perfectly legal and even encouraged for a small company are discouraged for a big one. And it's impossible to be sure which "competitive advantages" will be declared illegal by a future judge.
As for the precedents you cite, could you please name them and explain how they bear on current law? My reading of antitrust is quite different. Although there are certainly common threads, new legalistic theories are frequently used to change the rules to fit the current target.
You'll notice that the arguments in this trial were not about whether Microsoft did the things they are alleged to have done. They are about what their intentions are, and about whether the law makes those things illegal. I think that's clear evidence that there's a bad law. You rarely have a murder trial where the two sides disagree on what the definition of murder is. Yet this is typically what antitrust laws are about-- the argument is over the meaning of the law, rather than the actions of the defendent.
The fact that the meaning of the law is the major issue in the case tells me that it's a bad law. As I said, laws should be simple and objective. There's almost never any doubt about whether a particular act is murder or not. The same should be true of all laws-- they should specify as specifically as possible which acts are and are not illegal. Antitrust law doesn't do this, and so is bad law.
Why not? Finding promising innovations and using its distribution and marketing machine to get them to consumers is just as important as coming up with them oneself. The consumer doesn't care if Front page or AOE were invented in-house or bought from elsewhere. Even if Microsoft has bought every innovation they've ever made, who cares? They still are providing customers with products they willingly buy.
And it's not like Microsof is the only company doing the buying. There are dozens of companies with distribution and marketing machines that could do the exact same thing Microsoft is doing. indeed, this is one of the things that Cisco does really well-- it buys up a company and is able to integrate it's operations with its own very efficiently, allowing both the integration of new technologies and the advantages of economies of scale.
Startups are fully compensated for their companies. Indeed, there are many startups whose express purpose is to get bought out. It's a good way to make money.
So let's say Microsoft has bought out all of its innovations from others. Who has that harmed? The startups are happy, the consumers get products they might not have found otherwise, and Microsoft gets more money.
Isn't this, then a network of people commited to helping Microsoft remain a monopolistic bully?
No, it's a network of people who don't believe Microsoft is a "monopolistic bully," and that even if it is, government interference in the marketplace is a far greater threat than Microsoft ever was. The Federal government is the biggest and most dangerous "monopolistic bully" the world has ever known. Compared to all the evil things the Federal government has done, Bill Gates looks like a saint. The FIN is dedicated to ensuring that the nation's monopolistic bully--the federal government-- doesn't throw its weight around whenever consumers choose a product that they think is inferior.
As you can probably guess, I'm one of those people, although I'm not actually a FIN member. I also care a great deal about the rule of law, and I believe antitrust law makes a mockery of the idea that laws should be simple, objective, and apply equally to all. Antitrust law is vague, overreaching, and its meaning changes every time we get a new president. That's not the way the law is supposed to work. If an antitrust law is necessary (and I don't think it is) it needs to be written in a way that can be enforced clearly and unambiguously, and it needs to specify exactly which actions are crimes and which are not.
Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for Microsoft in this case. They are asked to prove that they have not been "anticompetitive," which is never clearly defined. It is asked to justify the choice to make IE a part of Windows, based on fuzzy legalistic claptrap.
In short, antitrust law gives the Federal government the unlimited power to harrass successful companies. There aren't enough lawyers in the country to prosecute every company that is arguably in violation of antitrust law-- every big company tries to keep its rivals from gaining market share. So instead, the government just goes after the ones who are high-profile and will generate good PR.
OK, so you've told me that there were programs in the 80's that you liked better than the programs that Microsoft has now. So what?
No program is "objectively better" than any other. All programs have good and bad features, and it is up to the individual to decide which mix of features, price, performance, convenience, and stability is best for him. You don't feel that Microsoft products meet your needs.
That's all well and good, but it says nothing about the economics of the situation. The fact that you dislike their products doesn't mean that they are "objectively" inferior. You have an opinion that they are inferior. Other people disagree. But whether you like MS products or not has no bearing on whether they are a monopoly.
As for the frivolous lawsuit, I agree that those are bad. But the solution to that is tort reform, not launching an antitrust case against them 10 years later. Certainly suing people for specious reasons is sleazy, but an overly-litigous tort system is not a defining feature of capitalism either. It is therefore not an indictment of the free market (or an argument for antitrust law) that sleazy lawsuits occur.
actually, the harm comes only after a company which has acquired a monopoly begins to use its control to stifle competition in its own AND ADJOINING business sectors.
This is what the DoJ says, but I just don't buy it. Having a large market share is certainly an advantage, but it is not an insurmountable advantage, and other firms can position themselves to have equal advantages. Furthermore, the exertion of such influence is not without cost. Microsoft can probably take over any one product if it spends enough money, but there is no guaruntee that they'll make money in the process. And if they don't make money, they are essentially just giving away a product below cost, which is a boon to consumers.
Furthermore, if the start integrating buggy features into their OS, consumers will get pissed eventually and switch to another OS. Yes, it will take a lot of aggravation before most consumers will switch, but that just reflects the enourmous value the market places on standardization.
I think you're right about the changes in the information age, although I think you're overstating the case. High-tech ventures are more susceptible to integration, since most high-tech assets are intangible and easily combined, but there will still be competition in similar markets. In part this is because contrary to antitrust conventions, markets are not atomic and clearly defined. Every company fills a niche in the marketplace, but the niches overlap. If I don't like a product, I can usually get pieces of the functionality I get from that product from a variety of other products. SO while every narrowly-defined business may become a monopoly, each business will still have to fight to retain customers who inhabit overlapping market niches.
Microsoft will probably never drive Apple or Sun out of business entirely, because each has a core constitutency that wants what Apple or Sun offer. But outside of Apple's core constituency are many users who would be happy on either Mac or Windows. It is for those users that Microsoft and Apple compete. But even if Microsoft gets all of them, Apple still has a base of customers that are not likely to ditch Apple for any reason.
The same is true in most markets-- few if any companies provide identical products. Each company specializes in ways that no other company does, and a merger of any two of these firms is likely to serve both niches poorly, and open up those niches to better-tailored competitors.
Any modern CGI script that uses a database backend and is written in Perl should be using DBI. If you write your code in DBI, then the only code you have to re-write is the connect statement plus cases where your SQL statements use a feature that's not present on the new DB. As long as you stick to standard SQL, porting to a new database is practically painless. I haven't looked at the slash code, but if it uses DBI, it shouldn't be too much work to port it to another database. On the other hand, database integrity in Slash is probably not its highest priority, so mySQL is not such a bad choice.
It may be that the law just makes it difficult to start a competitor, not impossible. But I do know that I only have one choice here in Minnesota, so the AT&T breakup didn't give me any choices in local service.
I dont think any of us want a return to the 1880's when huge businesses (standard oil anyone?) ran the country, and the government was merely a front for those businesses. Big business is too powerful as it is already.
Could you please present your evidence that in 1880 Standard Oil ran the country?
Standard Oil got the market position it did because it was really really efficient at what it did. Under their leadership, the price of oil dropped dramatically, leading to more oil at better prices for consumers. Its market share peaked in about 1890 at about 85%, and it had dropped to about 65% by the time it was broken up in 1910.
If they were such a big, bad, monopoly, how did they lose such a big chunk of their market share to competitors *before* they were broken up? And if they lost market share before hand, is it not likely that competitors would have continued to gain market share after the ruling?
The story about "robber barons" taught in high school is a myth. Yes, there was some corruption, and yes, some companies had a large market share. But most industries were highly competitive, and there were almost none (including the oil market) where one firm was able to wipe out all competition.
The same is true today. Most antitrust enforcement, including this decision, the Microsoft case, the Staples-Office Depot merger, and others, will help only these companies' competitors, at the expense of the consumer. The history of antitrust is full of examples of governments breaking up successful companies simply because they have driven some competitors out of business by offering a better product at a lower case. That's not how capitalism is supposed to work.
OK, but you are talking about local service, not long distance. Local service is a monopoly by law-- telephone regulations before the breakup of Ma Bell essentially gave them an exclusive monopoly over the local phone market. Today, that big monopoly has simply been broken up into a bunch of little monopolies-- you still only have one choice of local phone service in most parts of the country.
What needs to happen is that the laws giving the Baby Bells advantages over rivals needs to be repealed. This does not require antitrust law, nor does it require lawyers. It merely requires an act of Congress to rewrite the laws that are screwing us over in the first place.
Perhaps your copy of the Constitution is different than mine, but I don't remember anything in there about "Congress shall have the power to prevent the formation of private monopolies." Which clause exactly requires the Feds to prevent the formation of monopolies?
Secondly, what is a "predatory monopoly?" Since AT&T and numerous smaller firms are still in the market, what harm comes from having these two firms merge? And even if all three of them merged, what is to stop an upstart competitor from entering the market and challenging the established player?
Antitrust regulation is not in the Consitution. It is in legislation passed only since the 1890's. They are bad laws and do little to encourage competition. No government intervention is needed for competition to occur. The government need only keep its hands off and let the firms in the marketplace compete for the business of consumers. Historically, antitrust laws have been used by lesser competitors to stifle their more able competitors. The latest example is the Microsoft case. But there have been dozens of such examples over the last hundred years. There are very few examples where antitrust law has clearly benefitted anyone other than the competitors of the company being prosecuted.
No, actually the internet is the exception: it's about the only area that hasn't been trampled by lawyers and big government. I wholeheartedly agree that the government should butt out and let the internet continue running as it has been. But I think the same is true of most other industries and social structures. The computer industry is about the only industry that isn't heavily regulated. You can't say things the FCC doesn't like on the TV or radio. The FCC tells cable stations which stations they have to carry. Most industries are full of regulations, restrictions, subsidies, and loopholes.
Indeed, I think the success of the computer industry is largely because it has avoided regulation so far. If the FDA wasn't around I think medicine would be much more advanced than it is today. Had phone service not been nationalized and given to AT&T earlier in the century we'd likely have many more voice and data options and we'd probably have had DSL 5 years ago. After all, modems are just an end run against sluggish telcos that have refused to provide dedicated datalines at reasonable cost.
Pretty much any industry you pick, from health care to education to airlines to power generation has been stifled by government interference. The computer industry is about the only industry where decisions are *not* made by whomever has the most lawyers, and cases like this (and the DOJ's crusade against Microsoft) are threatening to put an end to that freedom.
Those who see the government as a threat to the net should study some history and look at the world around them. The internet is not the first case where the government trampled a free, open, and innovative culture with lawyers, regulations, and special interest manipulations. When netizens whine about government taking over their own corner of the world while supporting the same actions in other areas, what could have been a bold statement of individual freedom comes accross as special pleading. We are not the first victim of government meddling, and unless we recognize this, we will not be the last.
I don't think the second half applies. If I want to buy up "binarybitssucks" and point it to my home page to prevent anyone else from using it to cricize me, should that be illegal? Since I wouldn't be selling it, how would you decide what constitutes "critical?" Are you saying a company shouldn't be allowed to register any domain name that could be used to criticize them?
Two things. First, I don't see that the net is any different from any other medium. If I start publishing flyers from the Koka Kola company, they'll go after me in real life as much as on the net. Some of these decisions are clearly stupid, but in real trademark infringement cases (for example if I started an amazon.org) it seems to me it would be quite reasonable to prohibit me from selling books there.
It's not clear to me what gives the judge the power to transfer domain names, though.
Secondly, ICANN was given its authority in part by the US government, so it's not really a private organization.
That's not to say that this (and most) court decision is a good one.
Nonsense. If this were true, the same logic would apply to the Mac. Yet they've been writing Mac software for years.
Yes, they tend to give Windows an advantage with their products. But if they see a platform as a significant profit opportunity, they will go after it.
A particularly clear example of this is IE for the Mac. It's pretty much a completely separate product, and is IMHO much better than the alternatives. Why would they do this if they were out to destroy all non-Microsoft OS's?
I think the simple fact that too many Unix folks don't realize is that Unix isn't ready for prime time as a desktop OS. It simply isn't suitable for the 90% of the population who don't know how to use a Unix command line and have no interestin using one. Once a company manages to hide some of the complexity and bundle it up in a nice shrink-wrap package (as Red Hat is starting to do) there'll be much more interest in it by mainstream software makers. But as long as the platform is dominated by hard-core geeks, many of whom refuse to buy anything that isn't open-source, there simply isn't any profit in it.
I'm not trying to attack Linux here. I think it's a good server platform and it may very well overtake the desktop. But Microsoft's failure to port Office to it is not necessarily part of some grand conspiracy to destroy open source. There are a lot of other products made by other companies that haven't been ported to Linux. Linux simply isn't a very good desktop operating system yet, and so there's little money in writing desktop apps for it.
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The same logic would say the same thing about the tabacco industry. It doesn't matter if it kills thousands of people because Joe Sixpack would lose his job at the plant?
The tobacco industry hasn't killed anyone. Almost everyone who smokes is completely aware that their habit is likely to cause cancer and they do it anyway. They rational adults who are excercising their freedom of choice.
The tobacco industry has decieved people a few times, and they should be held liable for that. But the simple act of selling cigarattes is not and should not be considered unethical. It is not the job of a business to second-guess the choices of his customers, nor does he have anything to feel guilty about if a smoker (assuming the smoker is aware of the dangers of smoking) dies of cancer. The fundamental issue here is that people should be responsible for their actions-- cigarettes don't light themselves.
Secondly, money represents resources. When you say that some policy will cost a certain amount of money, that means that it prevents a certain amount of societal resources from being used for other purposes. Specifically, fuel-efficient cars will require more labor and more natural resources than gas-powered cars. So are you are saying that those extra resources should be expended no matter how many they are?
The point is not that gas-powered cars are intrinsically evil. Any means of transportation is going to cause pollution somplace. The trick it to make sure that the costs you impose on others is fully accounted for in the price of the goods and services you buy.
Taxing people thousands of dollars for driving fuel-inefficient cars is excessive. The issues isn't fuel economy (since people pay for the full price of fuel) but pollution. A tax on cars with poor fuel economy might be reasonable.
Secondly, the point is to make sure people take into account the full cost of their actions, rather than to punish people who commit the "evil" act of using an internal combustion engine. Therefore the punative nature of your post is inappropriate. Expecting someone to pay 15 grand to drive a car that gets 10 MPG is absurd, and is far out of proportion to the costs such a car imposes on the rest of us. Do a little research before imposing your values on the rest of us.
How many *more* people will be dependant on these resources then?
As oil wells start going dry, the price will begin to rise, and people will start shifting to alternative fuels. In addition, higher prices will lead to more R & D into new oil sources. Together these two factors will ensure a smooth and gradual transition to other energy sources.
How much more pain will be inflicted as a result?
Much less than if we start forcing people to use more expensive technologies now, when technology is less advanced and when the future of our oil supply is uncertain. People have been predicting the imminent depletion of oil supplies for decades. It hasn't happened yet, and may not happen for decades to come. It'll be much easier to switch to alternative fuels in 2050 than it is today.
How much more environmental degradation will both the consuming and the supplying nations suffer?
If you're talking about just the result of pollution, I don't there are any technologies that will eliminate that altogether. Solar and wind are not practical ways to power a car, and hybrid and electricity cars still use electricity, which in many cases is generated by burning fossil fuels. And cars these days are much cleaner than they were 20 years ago.
We *will* run our of petroleum some day.
No, we won't. There are two reasons for this. First, we keep finding new sources. The fact that oil is still below its price in the 70's tells us that it's still relatively plentiful. Secondly, if we ever do start to run out, the shortages will drive up prices which will curtail usage and preserve the reserves for the most urgent functions. There will be an assymptotic relationship: the closer we get to the "last barrel," the higher the price will go.
In practice, we will probably never hit that point, since as prices go up people will switch to alternatives and there will always be some available. Let the market work-- it will ensure a transition when it's needed, without imposing unnecessary costs when they are not needed.
There is an extremely simple and effective way to ensure there will always be gasoline available when it's needed: prices.
If you are right that we have a decade of gasoline left, then gas prices will rise steadily throughout the next decade. By the end of the decade (when gas is almost gone) prices will be so high that no one will be able to afford it, and so alternative fuel sources will be adopted out of necessity.
In practice, there isn't a single reservoir of oil, so there's never a point at which we "run out." It will simply get more and more expensive to extract, and as prices rise people will switch to other fuels.
It's worth pointing out that prior to the current spike, gas was at the lowest price in history. That's evidence that if anything oil supplies are more plentiful than at any other time in history. People have been predicting the imminent end of oil supplies since the 30's. But to raise the price now on the (likely false) assumption that it's going to run out quickly is as wrong-headed as lowering the price on the assumption that supplies will last forever.
Let the market work. As supplies get tight, prices will go up, and people will use alternative fuels. People in the future will have better alternatives than we do today, anyway, so it would be foolish for us to spend a lot of money rationing oil now when there might be a breakthrough in 10 years that makes oil obsolete.
Granting all of the above, this was still an amazing feat-- the 68k-to-PPC transition is the only time that a major consumer architecture transitioned to new processor without many consumers even noticing.
The 840 was discontinued in '94. The 9500 was introduced in '95. That means that the period of stagnation was only a year. And by the end of '96 almost all major apps had been re-written to be native, meaning that that 9500 was much faster a year after its introduction than the 840.
One year of performance stagnation is a small price to pay considering that it allowed Apple to abandon a creaking architecture and has allowed the Mac to surpass the competition with the G3. Now it's admittedly lagging behind again, but you can bet it would be much worse if we were still stuck the 68k chips.
I shudder to think what would happen if MS tried to pull the same trick.
I was not aware they didn't invent IE, but I don't see that it matters. IE 1 was a really shitty product. The impressive innovations I've seen have been the last couple versions, since they caught up to and surpassed Netscape in features and performance. You don't have to invent something from the ground up for it to count as an innovation. Improving a product in small ways is innovating as well.
I find the arrogance of the anti-Microsoft bigots on this forum appalling. Are you seriously saying that no reasonable person could disagree with you? That's absurd. Antitrust law is a complex enough and controversial enough law that there is room for reasonable disagreement on both sides. If you don't agree with me, fine. Let's hear your arguments. But attacking my motives or my integrity does nothing to further the discussion.
Of course opinion enters it. To say otherwise would be to say that Judge Jackson is infallible, which he clearly isn't. I disagree with both his premises (about how antitrust should be applied) and some of his specific conclusions (such as his definition of what a monopoly is) These are sufficiently complicated issues that it's ridiculous to say that once Jackson weighs in on the issue no dissent from that opinion is possible.
After all, it's a "matter of public record" that OJ was not guilty. Do you believe that too?
Well, buying a product and integrating it into their other products is a sort of innovation in itself, since it requires a good eye to what will be successful. Same is true of their marketing and distribution methods.
Not only that, but they *have* produced some products in-house. IE is the best example. I don't know about the Windows side, but the Mac version of IE 5 kicks ass. I generally don't like Microsoft's products, but this is one product that I think is far superior to the alternatives.
I think people here have a too-narrow notion of innovation. No, Microsoft hasn't produced anything on the order of the modern GUI or OO programming. But it has performed thousands of relentless innovations that have made their products gradually better. It is precisely these small innovations that are threatened by the government. If Microsoft has to justify every feature and change to the government, they likely will be extremely timid about making changes.
How do you figure? If they can make a competing product at a lower price, which shouldn't they? Isn't that what competition all about? You can look at it as an "unfair advantage," but nowhere is it written that competition has to be fair in the sense that a baseball game is fair.
The purpose of a market is to produce the best products at the lowest price. If MS is able to produce products for less than anyone else, I see that as a boon to consumers. I think it's ridiculous that people are *complaining* that IE is "too cheap." If you want Netscape, go ahead and use it.
It would be ridiculous to guaruntee that every business will make a profit. When you go into business, one of the risks you take is that a bigger company will come along and outcompete you in the marketplace. It sucks for you, but it's a boon to consumers. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
It's Judge Jackson's opinion. I don't share it.
In brief, it's illegal to use one monopoly to acquire another, different monopoly. What part of that is hard to understand?
You want a list?
The definition of "monopoly" is extremely unclear. The precised definition depends on how you define the relevant market, which in practice is a largely arbitrary decision.
IE is far from a monopoly. Which monopoly did MS get?
The above is (again) the current interpretation of the law. Again, the interpretation changes with time. For example, I don't remember Standard Oil ever using one monopoly to gain another.
The law is spottily enforced. After all, Apple has a monopoly on Macintosh computers, and they are now using that monopoly to increase market share for ClarisWorks and Final Cut. Should the DoJ step in there?
It is not at all clear what constitutes "using" a monopoly. After all, there are clear technical advantages to integrating an app with an OS. How do you tell which integrations are "good" and which are "bad?"
You might have answers to all of the above questions, but the fact is that the answers change with each prosecutor, and are therefore it is impossible to know for sure which actions will be declared illegal. Most of the things Microsoft is not faulted for would not have been thought illegal by many antitrust lawyers in the 1980's.
That's pretty hard to do when their own emails show that they did it for competitive advantage.
Of course they did it for "competitive advantage." Everything every company does is for competitive advantage. That's what's perverse about antitrust law-- things that are perfectly legal and even encouraged for a small company are discouraged for a big one. And it's impossible to be sure which "competitive advantages" will be declared illegal by a future judge.
As for the precedents you cite, could you please name them and explain how they bear on current law? My reading of antitrust is quite different. Although there are certainly common threads, new legalistic theories are frequently used to change the rules to fit the current target.
You'll notice that the arguments in this trial were not about whether Microsoft did the things they are alleged to have done. They are about what their intentions are, and about whether the law makes those things illegal. I think that's clear evidence that there's a bad law. You rarely have a murder trial where the two sides disagree on what the definition of murder is. Yet this is typically what antitrust laws are about-- the argument is over the meaning of the law, rather than the actions of the defendent.
The fact that the meaning of the law is the major issue in the case tells me that it's a bad law. As I said, laws should be simple and objective. There's almost never any doubt about whether a particular act is murder or not. The same should be true of all laws-- they should specify as specifically as possible which acts are and are not illegal. Antitrust law doesn't do this, and so is bad law.
purchasing that improvement doesn't count.
Why not? Finding promising innovations and using its distribution and marketing machine to get them to consumers is just as important as coming up with them oneself. The consumer doesn't care if Front page or AOE were invented in-house or bought from elsewhere. Even if Microsoft has bought every innovation they've ever made, who cares? They still are providing customers with products they willingly buy.
And it's not like Microsof is the only company doing the buying. There are dozens of companies with distribution and marketing machines that could do the exact same thing Microsoft is doing. indeed, this is one of the things that Cisco does really well-- it buys up a company and is able to integrate it's operations with its own very efficiently, allowing both the integration of new technologies and the advantages of economies of scale.
Startups are fully compensated for their companies. Indeed, there are many startups whose express purpose is to get bought out. It's a good way to make money.
So let's say Microsoft has bought out all of its innovations from others. Who has that harmed? The startups are happy, the consumers get products they might not have found otherwise, and Microsoft gets more money.
I don't see the problem
Isn't this, then a network of people commited to helping Microsoft remain a monopolistic bully?
No, it's a network of people who don't believe Microsoft is a "monopolistic bully," and that even if it is, government interference in the marketplace is a far greater threat than Microsoft ever was. The Federal government is the biggest and most dangerous "monopolistic bully" the world has ever known. Compared to all the evil things the Federal government has done, Bill Gates looks like a saint. The FIN is dedicated to ensuring that the nation's monopolistic bully--the federal government-- doesn't throw its weight around whenever consumers choose a product that they think is inferior.
As you can probably guess, I'm one of those people, although I'm not actually a FIN member. I also care a great deal about the rule of law, and I believe antitrust law makes a mockery of the idea that laws should be simple, objective, and apply equally to all. Antitrust law is vague, overreaching, and its meaning changes every time we get a new president. That's not the way the law is supposed to work. If an antitrust law is necessary (and I don't think it is) it needs to be written in a way that can be enforced clearly and unambiguously, and it needs to specify exactly which actions are crimes and which are not.
Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for Microsoft in this case. They are asked to prove that they have not been "anticompetitive," which is never clearly defined. It is asked to justify the choice to make IE a part of Windows, based on fuzzy legalistic claptrap.
In short, antitrust law gives the Federal government the unlimited power to harrass successful companies. There aren't enough lawyers in the country to prosecute every company that is arguably in violation of antitrust law-- every big company tries to keep its rivals from gaining market share. So instead, the government just goes after the ones who are high-profile and will generate good PR.
OK, so you've told me that there were programs in the 80's that you liked better than the programs that Microsoft has now. So what?
No program is "objectively better" than any other. All programs have good and bad features, and it is up to the individual to decide which mix of features, price, performance, convenience, and stability is best for him. You don't feel that Microsoft products meet your needs.
That's all well and good, but it says nothing about the economics of the situation. The fact that you dislike their products doesn't mean that they are "objectively" inferior. You have an opinion that they are inferior. Other people disagree. But whether you like MS products or not has no bearing on whether they are a monopoly.
As for the frivolous lawsuit, I agree that those are bad. But the solution to that is tort reform, not launching an antitrust case against them 10 years later. Certainly suing people for specious reasons is sleazy, but an overly-litigous tort system is not a defining feature of capitalism either. It is therefore not an indictment of the free market (or an argument for antitrust law) that sleazy lawsuits occur.
actually, the harm comes only after a company which has acquired a monopoly begins to use its control to stifle competition in its own AND ADJOINING business sectors.
This is what the DoJ says, but I just don't buy it. Having a large market share is certainly an advantage, but it is not an insurmountable advantage, and other firms can position themselves to have equal advantages. Furthermore, the exertion of such influence is not without cost. Microsoft can probably take over any one product if it spends enough money, but there is no guaruntee that they'll make money in the process. And if they don't make money, they are essentially just giving away a product below cost, which is a boon to consumers.
Furthermore, if the start integrating buggy features into their OS, consumers will get pissed eventually and switch to another OS. Yes, it will take a lot of aggravation before most consumers will switch, but that just reflects the enourmous value the market places on standardization.
I think you're right about the changes in the information age, although I think you're overstating the case. High-tech ventures are more susceptible to integration, since most high-tech assets are intangible and easily combined, but there will still be competition in similar markets. In part this is because contrary to antitrust conventions, markets are not atomic and clearly defined. Every company fills a niche in the marketplace, but the niches overlap. If I don't like a product, I can usually get pieces of the functionality I get from that product from a variety of other products. SO while every narrowly-defined business may become a monopoly, each business will still have to fight to retain customers who inhabit overlapping market niches.
Microsoft will probably never drive Apple or Sun out of business entirely, because each has a core constitutency that wants what Apple or Sun offer. But outside of Apple's core constituency are many users who would be happy on either Mac or Windows. It is for those users that Microsoft and Apple compete. But even if Microsoft gets all of them, Apple still has a base of customers that are not likely to ditch Apple for any reason.
The same is true in most markets-- few if any companies provide identical products. Each company specializes in ways that no other company does, and a merger of any two of these firms is likely to serve both niches poorly, and open up those niches to better-tailored competitors.
Any modern CGI script that uses a database backend and is written in Perl should be using DBI. If you write your code in DBI, then the only code you have to re-write is the connect statement plus cases where your SQL statements use a feature that's not present on the new DB. As long as you stick to standard SQL, porting to a new database is practically painless. I haven't looked at the slash code, but if it uses DBI, it shouldn't be too much work to port it to another database. On the other hand, database integrity in Slash is probably not its highest priority, so mySQL is not such a bad choice.
It may be that the law just makes it difficult to start a competitor, not impossible. But I do know that I only have one choice here in Minnesota, so the AT&T breakup didn't give me any choices in local service.
I dont think any of us want a return to the 1880's when huge businesses (standard oil anyone?) ran the country, and the government was merely a front for those businesses. Big business is too powerful as it is already.
Could you please present your evidence that in 1880 Standard Oil ran the country?
Standard Oil got the market position it did because it was really really efficient at what it did. Under their leadership, the price of oil dropped dramatically, leading to more oil at better prices for consumers. Its market share peaked in about 1890 at about 85%, and it had dropped to about 65% by the time it was broken up in 1910.
If they were such a big, bad, monopoly, how did they lose such a big chunk of their market share to competitors *before* they were broken up? And if they lost market share before hand, is it not likely that competitors would have continued to gain market share after the ruling?
The story about "robber barons" taught in high school is a myth. Yes, there was some corruption, and yes, some companies had a large market share. But most industries were highly competitive, and there were almost none (including the oil market) where one firm was able to wipe out all competition.
The same is true today. Most antitrust enforcement, including this decision, the Microsoft case, the Staples-Office Depot merger, and others, will help only these companies' competitors, at the expense of the consumer. The history of antitrust is full of examples of governments breaking up successful companies simply because they have driven some competitors out of business by offering a better product at a lower case. That's not how capitalism is supposed to work.
they can't grow to the point where they threaten the public good.
How exactly is the public good threatened by a larger long distance carrier?
OK, but you are talking about local service, not long distance. Local service is a monopoly by law-- telephone regulations before the breakup of Ma Bell essentially gave them an exclusive monopoly over the local phone market. Today, that big monopoly has simply been broken up into a bunch of little monopolies-- you still only have one choice of local phone service in most parts of the country.
What needs to happen is that the laws giving the Baby Bells advantages over rivals needs to be repealed. This does not require antitrust law, nor does it require lawyers. It merely requires an act of Congress to rewrite the laws that are screwing us over in the first place.
Perhaps your copy of the Constitution is different than mine, but I don't remember anything in there about "Congress shall have the power to prevent the formation of private monopolies." Which clause exactly requires the Feds to prevent the formation of monopolies?
Secondly, what is a "predatory monopoly?" Since AT&T and numerous smaller firms are still in the market, what harm comes from having these two firms merge? And even if all three of them merged, what is to stop an upstart competitor from entering the market and challenging the established player?
Antitrust regulation is not in the Consitution. It is in legislation passed only since the 1890's. They are bad laws and do little to encourage competition. No government intervention is needed for competition to occur. The government need only keep its hands off and let the firms in the marketplace compete for the business of consumers. Historically, antitrust laws have been used by lesser competitors to stifle their more able competitors. The latest example is the Microsoft case. But there have been dozens of such examples over the last hundred years. There are very few examples where antitrust law has clearly benefitted anyone other than the competitors of the company being prosecuted.
No, actually the internet is the exception: it's about the only area that hasn't been trampled by lawyers and big government. I wholeheartedly agree that the government should butt out and let the internet continue running as it has been. But I think the same is true of most other industries and social structures. The computer industry is about the only industry that isn't heavily regulated. You can't say things the FCC doesn't like on the TV or radio. The FCC tells cable stations which stations they have to carry. Most industries are full of regulations, restrictions, subsidies, and loopholes.
Indeed, I think the success of the computer industry is largely because it has avoided regulation so far. If the FDA wasn't around I think medicine would be much more advanced than it is today. Had phone service not been nationalized and given to AT&T earlier in the century we'd likely have many more voice and data options and we'd probably have had DSL 5 years ago. After all, modems are just an end run against sluggish telcos that have refused to provide dedicated datalines at reasonable cost.
Pretty much any industry you pick, from health care to education to airlines to power generation has been stifled by government interference. The computer industry is about the only industry where decisions are *not* made by whomever has the most lawyers, and cases like this (and the DOJ's crusade against Microsoft) are threatening to put an end to that freedom.
Those who see the government as a threat to the net should study some history and look at the world around them. The internet is not the first case where the government trampled a free, open, and innovative culture with lawyers, regulations, and special interest manipulations. When netizens whine about government taking over their own corner of the world while supporting the same actions in other areas, what could have been a bold statement of individual freedom comes accross as special pleading. We are not the first victim of government meddling, and unless we recognize this, we will not be the last.
I don't think the second half applies. If I want to buy up "binarybitssucks" and point it to my home page to prevent anyone else from using it to cricize me, should that be illegal? Since I wouldn't be selling it, how would you decide what constitutes "critical?" Are you saying a company shouldn't be allowed to register any domain name that could be used to criticize them?
Two things. First, I don't see that the net is any different from any other medium. If I start publishing flyers from the Koka Kola company, they'll go after me in real life as much as on the net. Some of these decisions are clearly stupid, but in real trademark infringement cases (for example if I started an amazon.org) it seems to me it would be quite reasonable to prohibit me from selling books there.
It's not clear to me what gives the judge the power to transfer domain names, though.
Secondly, ICANN was given its authority in part by the US government, so it's not really a private organization.
That's not to say that this (and most) court decision is a good one.
Nonsense. If this were true, the same logic would apply to the Mac. Yet they've been writing Mac software for years.
Yes, they tend to give Windows an advantage with their products. But if they see a platform as a significant profit opportunity, they will go after it.
A particularly clear example of this is IE for the Mac. It's pretty much a completely separate product, and is IMHO much better than the alternatives. Why would they do this if they were out to destroy all non-Microsoft OS's?
I think the simple fact that too many Unix folks don't realize is that Unix isn't ready for prime time as a desktop OS. It simply isn't suitable for the 90% of the population who don't know how to use a Unix command line and have no interestin using one. Once a company manages to hide some of the complexity and bundle it up in a nice shrink-wrap package (as Red Hat is starting to do) there'll be much more interest in it by mainstream software makers. But as long as the platform is dominated by hard-core geeks, many of whom refuse to buy anything that isn't open-source, there simply isn't any profit in it.
I'm not trying to attack Linux here. I think it's a good server platform and it may very well overtake the desktop. But Microsoft's failure to port Office to it is not necessarily part of some grand conspiracy to destroy open source. There are a lot of other products made by other companies that haven't been ported to Linux. Linux simply isn't a very good desktop operating system yet, and so there's little money in writing desktop apps for it.