Re:Why it won't work in Linux for a while yet
on
Minolta 3D Camera
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· Score: 1
Metacreations has essentially dropped their graphics business to become an "e-commerce visualization internet company". They've laid off a good portion of their staff and have not given any statements about where the future lies for their major graphics apps. User beware.
BTW, there's plenty of "Eyecandy over functionality" in unix. Remember what enlightenment started out like?
15 competing platforms was *not* a bad thing for the computing industry. Innovation happens at much quicker rates, and OS makers are forced to create better products or they will die a quick death. In a growth industry, it is not efficient to have one single standard controlled by one company, despite the advantages it has for development. Even today, you can see the benefits for software developers to have multiple platforms to produce their work on, because of the different superior features of each OS.
I'd much rather have many standards than have one proprietary standard which is controlled by one company.
My response to Jerry Pournelle's history lesson
on
Everything Microsoft
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· Score: 1
Pointing out the history of the personal computing industry is useful, but that is not what the lawsuit was about--back then, microsoft had virutally no market power. The lawsuit was about recent years, where microsoft has been the default choice for desktop OS, word processor, spreadsheet, etc.
Certainly it could have been Apple or IBM in this monopoly position today if they had made better decisions (and they might be the ones in court today), but they didn't, and thus they didn't even have a chance to be as monopolistic as microsoft is today. This failure of theirs is irrelevant to the case. What is relevant is how microsoft has acted in the past few years while in their monopolistic position.
Looking at the history of the personal computer industry, it's clear that there was much more change in the 1979-1990 period when microsoft still had little market power. There was a large variety of personal computers running a variety of operating systems, a number of different productivity applications, and new products cropping up everywhere. The level of growth in diversity has since dropped in areas that microsoft has controlled:
In operating systems, we're down to just a few with small numbers of users, unix is re-consolidating back into a single OS. In spreadsheets, what is there anymore but MS Excel? How many people use a word processor other than MS Word? And MS internet explorer has a large majority of the web browser market today, and there are no longer the variety of web browsers as there were before (I remember on my old Mac during college i was running Mosaic, Netscape, WebShark (Tenon's web browser), Macweb, Cyberdog, and a few more web browsers, all with interesting unique features that have now disappeared).
What happens when the market is left with only one supplier is that the supplier will only improve the product as it will help them earn money. So, Microsoft will add a few new features to Excel every once in a while to get users to pay for an upgrade, but this pace of product improvement is much slower than that of a competitive market, where Microsoft has to add new features to Excel to compete with Lotus 1-2-3 (As a heavy spreadsheet user, i think there's still a ton of innovation which could be put into improving them, but there's no one around to implement it, and the barriers for new entrants are high). In the markets Microsoft dominates, this slowdown is quite apparent.
Microsoft is still upgrading products and making them better and benefitting consumers. The reason consumers are being hurt is that they could be receiving a much greater benefit if the markets were competitive. The benefit to consumers of competition is not just a $30 cheaper copy of windows; it is the ability for consumers to have the best product that the industry can produce--not windows, not linux, not mac--we haven't seen it yet, because it can only be produced in a competitive environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Metacreations has essentially dropped their graphics business to become an "e-commerce visualization internet company". They've laid off a good portion of their staff and have not given any statements about where the future lies for their major graphics apps. User beware.
BTW, there's plenty of "Eyecandy over functionality" in unix. Remember what enlightenment started out like?
A public boycott, if intended to cause action, is a publicity stunt. Sometimes publicity stunts work well.
A personal boycott is more of an ethical action.
15 competing platforms was *not* a bad thing for the computing industry. Innovation happens at much quicker rates, and OS makers are forced to create better products or they will die a quick death. In a growth industry, it is not efficient to have one single standard controlled by one company, despite the advantages it has for development. Even today, you can see the benefits for software developers to have multiple platforms to produce their work on, because of the different superior features of each OS.
I'd much rather have many standards than have one proprietary standard which is controlled by one company.
Certainly it could have been Apple or IBM in this monopoly position today if they had made better decisions (and they might be the ones in court today), but they didn't, and thus they didn't even have a chance to be as monopolistic as microsoft is today. This failure of theirs is irrelevant to the case. What is relevant is how microsoft has acted in the past few years while in their monopolistic position.
Looking at the history of the personal computer industry, it's clear that there was much more change in the 1979-1990 period when microsoft still had little market power. There was a large variety of personal computers running a variety of operating systems, a number of different productivity applications, and new products cropping up everywhere. The level of growth in diversity has since dropped in areas that microsoft has controlled:
In operating systems, we're down to just a few with small numbers of users, unix is re-consolidating back into a single OS. In spreadsheets, what is there anymore but MS Excel? How many people use a word processor other than MS Word? And MS internet explorer has a large majority of the web browser market today, and there are no longer the variety of web browsers as there were before (I remember on my old Mac during college i was running Mosaic, Netscape, WebShark (Tenon's web browser), Macweb, Cyberdog, and a few more web browsers, all with interesting unique features that have now disappeared).
What happens when the market is left with only one supplier is that the supplier will only improve the product as it will help them earn money. So, Microsoft will add a few new features to Excel every once in a while to get users to pay for an upgrade, but this pace of product improvement is much slower than that of a competitive market, where Microsoft has to add new features to Excel to compete with Lotus 1-2-3 (As a heavy spreadsheet user, i think there's still a ton of innovation which could be put into improving them, but there's no one around to implement it, and the barriers for new entrants are high). In the markets Microsoft dominates, this slowdown is quite apparent.
Microsoft is still upgrading products and making them better and benefitting consumers. The reason consumers are being hurt is that they could be receiving a much greater benefit if the markets were competitive. The benefit to consumers of competition is not just a $30 cheaper copy of windows; it is the ability for consumers to have the best product that the industry can produce--not windows, not linux, not mac--we haven't seen it yet, because it can only be produced in a competitive environment.