The journal article actually states that there are two possible situations: (1) a superior technology exists, but the cost of transition is too high; and (2) a superior technology exists, and the cost of transition is NOT too high.
The point of the article is that Dvorak is an example of type (1) and not type (2).
QWERTY is often used as the canonical example of economic inefficiency where a superior technology SHOULD take over. They refute that and argue that QWERTY won originally on its merits and that Dvorak has failed to replace it because it has not been demonstrated to be cost-effective.
A few facts about the QWERTY/Dvorak debate
on
The Myth of QWERTY
·
· Score: 1
A very interesting article, but flawed. You can't judge the QWERTY/Dvorak debate solely on Economic grounds.
True, but the journal article did not do that. It was also a critique of the pro-Dvorak studies and a more thorough consideration of how QWERTY was adopted in the first case.
Of COURSE it's a pain in the ass to relearn how to type. It can take up to a month before people are up to snuff in Dvorak.
Before QWERTY was adopted, virtually every typists was a "new" typist. The "retraining" costs weren't there and if there were incentives to develop layouts that could be taught more quickly. Mechanical failures had been overcome and QWERTY won its merits.
Dvorak spent over 10 YEARS developing the Dvorak layout, under the guise of a study for the Navy. He filmed typists, found the common problems, and fixed them. I'd like to see ONE study that supports the claim that QWERTY is as fast or faster. It just doesn't make sense:
Dvorak had a financial incentive to "prove" his keyboard was better. The Navy tests were not controlled and were most likely cooked. The journal article goes into great detail to get the original studies and critique them.
FACT: Every national typing contest since 1931 has been won by a typist with a Dvorak keyboard.
Typing contests are NOT random samples, but rather self-selected samples (generally of those with an incentive to prove that their method is best).
One of the main reasons is...
Scientific studies have shown that the most limiting part of typing is being able to translate thought into physical action. The theoretical advantages to Dvorak have not been adequately proven.
FACT: With a QWERTY keyboard, only 30% of your keystrokes will be in the home row.
FACT: With a Dvorak keyboard, over 70% of your keystrokes will be in the home row.
Again, this does not seem to be the major limiting factor to typing speeds.
You can realize for yourself what this means to the average typist.
Nevertheless, it has yet to be proven.
These OSes have a program called xmodmap that makes it simple to switch their keys around.
This doesn't relabel the keys. It doesn't address the fact that no matter what OS you run, you will find yourself at someone else's keyboard. All for advantages that
As for hotkeys, deal with it. It took me about a week to get used to the new keys in vi--they don't have intuitive positions, but realistically, once you get used to them, it doesn't really matter...
If it doesn't matter where the hot keys are, why does it matter where the other keys are? If the answer is to "get used to it", why bother? Why not "get used to" QWERTY?
> For those unix weenies: take a class in critical thinking before you open your mouth again.
Is this an example of your critical thinking?
> For the record, let me talk a bit of personal experience for those interested.
Critical thinkers do not generally rely on testimonials. Controlled experiments and thoughtful consideration of the literature are hallmarks of critical thinking. Name calling, alas, is not.
> I try not to support stupid things, such as Qwerty, vi, unixism and perl.
Critical thinkers, I fear, do not believe that one can "prove" an opinion.
Yes, QWERTY was originally designed to prevent key jams. But it wasn't adopted as a standard until after the mechanical failings of earlier typewriters had already been overcome. It competed fairly and openly in the market and won its place as a standard based on its merits.
The notion that we are tied to QWERTY because of the mechanical failings of early machines is the myth that the journal article sought to disprove.
First, the article goes to great length to argue that when QWERTY was adopted, it had plenty of competition and the mechanical failures had been overcome before it was a standard. This is not a case of "First Wins" because QWERTY had plenty of competition long before it was adopted. It would have been relatively costless in the early days to change the keyboard layout (and many did), but QWERTY won anyways.
Second, the article argues that there is no CLEAR advantage to Dvorak. One should not adopt new technology with evidence that it is superior, and the evidence for Dvorak has been cooked.
Read the article! There was no "retraining" cost before QWERTY was standard because virtually every machine sold involved training the typist. If training time were shorter or speed much greater, they could have easily outsold Remington.
QWERTY was not a standard until after the mechanical limits were surpassed. QWERTY was adopted much later throughout the world, where standardization simply can't be argued.
Although Dvorak was proposed after QWERTY was adopted, similair layouts did compete (and lose) to QWERTY.
The Fable of the Keys offers an alternate (and better documented) history of the adoption of QWERTY.
QWERTY was not an immediate standard. Few people knew how to type and virtually every typewriter sold to a business resulted in training. Faster, easier keyboards has plently of opportunity to compete. The mechanical drawbacks of the original QWERTY had already been overcome:
The Blickensderfer used a type-bar configuration similar in principle to the IBM Selectric type ball and, so, could easily offer many different configurations.
QWERTY won on its merits. When the rivals failed, QWERTY was not a standard:
The rival keyboards did ultimately fail, of course.53 But the Qwerty keyboard cannot have been so well established at the time the rival key-boards were first offered that they were rejected because they were non-standard. Manufacturers of typewriters sought and promoted any technical feature that might give them an advantage in the market. Certainly shorter training and greater speed would have been an attractive selling point for a typewriter with an alternative keyboard. Neither can it be said that the rival keyboards were doomed by inferior mechanical characteristics because these companies went on to produce successful and innovative, though Qwerty-based, typing machines. Thus we cannot attribute our inheritance of the Qwerty keyboard to a lack of alternative keyboards or the chance association of this keyboard arrangement with the only mechanically adequate typewriter.
Finally, with no standards or mechanical incentives, QWERTY dominated world markets when it was initially introduced:
We should also take note of the fact that the Qwerty keyboard, although invented in the United States. has become the dominant keyboard throughout the world. Foreign countries, when introduced to typewriters, need not have adopted this keyboard if superior alternatives existed since there would not yet have been any typists trained on Qwerty Yet all other keyboard designs fell before the Qwerty juggernaut.
First, the article *refutes* the claim that you can retrain in 2 weeks. Second, the "cost of converting" is quite a bit more than just the cost of the retraining.
The ergonomic benefits of Dvorak remain unproven.
Typing competitions are not random samples of the population but are rather self-selected samples of people with vested interests in "proving" their product is superior.
Ack! Read the article again. "First wins" is the MYTH that the article refutes. The myth is that the failure to adopt the vastly superior Dvorak layout is a market failure. But the superiority of Dvorak was overstated, the costs are high and the benefits are small. There ARE benefits (or at least there MAY be benefits) with Dvorak, but they simply aren't "worth" it.
PLEASE read the article. Virtually everything you state is a myth, and point of the Economist article (and the Journal article it cites) was to refute these myths.
First, the poster that I was responding to was simply restating the myth that QWERTY was adopted based on an unfair test. In fact, there were several competitions and not all of the competitors were as klunky as ones with pedals or separate keys for upper/lower case.
The "Fable of the Keys" does NOT assert that QWERTY is still the "best" choice (others do make that assertion and argue that tests for Dvorak have been mostly cooked). The central point of the article was that, sometimes, it is NOT economically effecient to adopt a superior technology. The costs of retraining, which Dvorak supporters understate, do not "pay for themselves".
Adoption of a superior technology where the cost of conversion are less than the benefits would be a market failure. QWERTY is simply not such an example. It was not a hastily chosen standard, but was in fact adopted based on its merits (at the time). Dvorak's claims of superiority and ease of conversion have been overstated and THAT is the reason it has not been widely adopted. The costs do not outweight the benefits.
It's not a limit of "thinking" but of converting thoughts into finger movement.
Stenographers aren't typing every letter of every word, which is why they can type faster. They don't have to convert every letter of every word into a neurological impulse.
According to "The Fable of the Keys", there were in fact several early competitions. They argue quite convincingly that QWERTY was adopted on its merits. There main point is not that Dvorak is not superior, but that the costs of switching do not outweigh the benefits.
Was the Scientific American story based on the work by Paul David? "The Fable of the Keys" is a refutation of David's work, which has been widely cited as authoritative. If Sci. Am. used David's research, there results would also be flawed.
The "Fable of the Keys" article does a pretty good job of doing original research into the adoption and acceptance of QWERTY.
They do not assert that QWERTY is superior (although they don't necessarily accept it either), but are simply arguing that it would not be benneficial to switch.
The article does NOT assert that Dvorak is inferior to Dvorak, but rather that the failure to adopt is not a market failure. From the journal article (http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html):
There are several versions of the claim that a switch to Dvorak would not be worthwhile. The strongest. which we do not make. is that Qwerty is proven to be the best imaginable keyboard. Neither can we claim that Dvorak is proven to be inferior to Qwerty. Our claim is that there is no scientifically acceptable evidence that Dvorak offers any read [sic] advantage over Qwerty. Because of this claim, our assessment of a market failure in this case is rather simple. It might have been more complicated. For example, if Dvorak were found to be superior. it might still be the case that the total social benefits are less than the cost of switching. In that case, we could look for market failure only in the process that started us On the Qwerty keyboard (if the alternative were available at the beginning). Or we might have concluded that Dvorak is better and that all parties could be made better off if we could costlessly command both a switch and any necessary redistribution. Such a finding would constitute a market failure in the sense of mainstream welfare economics. Of course, this circumstance still might not constitute a market in the sense of Demsetz. which requires consideration of the costs of feasible institutions that could efiect the change.
The article *refutes* the assertion that we must overcome the ineffeciency of Dvorak. QWERTY, it seems, is not so ineffecient after all and claims to the contrary come from biased sources. Ergonomic literature argues that QWERTY may, in fact, be superior and the true limits to typing speed are neurological and not the physical speed of are fingers.
> However, the unique computer ID is stored in a > Word document only once -- when the document is > created. Even if a document is copied to a new > computer, and saved under a new name, the > original GUID number does not change.
One of the more common laments over patent law has been over corporations who hold a patent and have no intention of creating a product with it. In some cases, they simply don't want the competition. In other cases, they find that they can make more money simply licensing the patent (and even then, they do so in a limited fashion). Finally, some corpations simply don't have the resources or vision.
In the '60s and '70s, more than 70% of litigated patents were declared invalid. But since the 1980's when Reagan established the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC, the first circuit court with national jurisdiction) the court has been handing out HUGE rewards to patent holders (eg Polariod won an $873 mil. from Kodak). In the current IP climate, owning a patent can be extremely profitable without even developing a product (Honeywell won $93 mil. from Minolta over a patent Honeywell had licensed to Minolta; Honeywell claimed Minolta used a version of the patent in the Maxxum 35mm).
Many firms who hold patents just don't have the vision to see the products that can be created or the ability to market them. Xerox PARC jumps to mind. Many attribute the failure of PARC to the fact that Xerox was a copier company and had no interest in marketing computers.
Because of the potential profitability of patents, firms will patent everything in site, even if they don't have the resources or motivation to develop these inventions. A single entity just doesn't have the time to produce hundreds (or even dozens) of new products every year. They may not "set out" to limit innovation, but that is the end result.
The success of post-it notes was a fluke. Marketing didn't know what they had (the central premise of Dilbert). The engineers discovered it by accident, and realized what they had. They created a bunch of pads and gave them to the executives-- an instant success. When they ran out, the top dogs wanted (NEEDED) more and were told by the engineers that it wasn't really a product. That's what got the ball rolling...
Even the most ardent supporters of patents admit that there is a tradeoff here. Allowing patents, they feel, gives incentive to motivate. But they also realize that they are creating monopolies and that monopolies are, in general, bad for the economy. They don't have competition, and therefore have lost some incentive to improve their products (that does NOT mean that they've lost ALL incentive).
Read the article again. Aspects of the market economy are zero sum. If I'm a customer and I plan to buy a product, I will buy either from Seller A or Seller B, but not both. The game between A and B for my dollar is a zero sum game.
His counter-example in the gift economy isn't quite right, though. He compares a buyer & seller and describes how they both gain (user gets free software, seller gets free debugger). That's true, but no different than the fact that a buyer in the market gets a product and the seller gets money.
It would be more apt to compare two software products. And here it may *still* be a zero sum game. If Program A and Program B (emacs and vim, for example) each benefit from more debuggers, then the competition to get the user to use A or B is identical to the market economy. Only one program will get the user.
Yes, that was competition and competition is a good thing. But what about, according the article, the M$ strategy of forcing Hyndai to pay a licensing fee whether or not the computer used M$-DOS.
No one thinks M$ shouldn't try and compete with better products & service. The complaints center around M$ using its current market power to compete *unfairly*.
I believe Futurama makes some joke about the Simpsons still being on the air...
I still get a kick out of the Simpsons. It's not as good as it once was, but still better than 90% of everything on TV. I'm sure Futurama will be better than the Dilbert show.
In what way, exactly, does a flame threaten freedom?
Freedom means being able to say M$ is wonderful, but it also means you can get criticized, berated, called childish names, have funny pictures drawn of your mother, and you may even be ignored (which, frankly, I think most "pro-M$" posters fear the most).
I may not agree with what your bumper sticker says But I'll defend to death your right to stick it!
Slashdot Mirror
The journal article actually states that there are two possible situations: (1) a superior technology exists, but the cost of transition is too high; and (2) a superior technology exists, and the cost of transition is NOT too high.
The point of the article is that Dvorak is an example of type (1) and not type (2).
QWERTY is often used as the canonical example of economic inefficiency where a superior technology SHOULD take over. They refute that and argue that QWERTY won originally on its merits and that Dvorak has failed to replace it because it has not been demonstrated to be cost-effective.
True, but the journal article did not do that. It was also a critique of the pro-Dvorak studies and a more thorough consideration of how QWERTY was adopted in the first case.
Of COURSE it's a pain in the ass to relearn how to type. It can take up to a month before people are up to snuff in Dvorak.
Before QWERTY was adopted, virtually every typists was a "new" typist. The "retraining" costs weren't there and if there were incentives to develop layouts that could be taught more quickly. Mechanical failures had been overcome and QWERTY won its merits.
Dvorak spent over 10 YEARS developing the Dvorak layout, under the guise of a study for the Navy. He filmed typists, found the common problems, and fixed them. I'd like to see ONE study that supports the claim that QWERTY is as fast or faster. It just doesn't make sense:
Dvorak had a financial incentive to "prove" his keyboard was better. The Navy tests were not controlled and were most likely cooked. The journal article goes into great detail to get the original studies and critique them.
FACT: Every national typing contest since 1931 has been won by a typist with a Dvorak keyboard.
Typing contests are NOT random samples, but rather self-selected samples (generally of those with an incentive to prove that their method is best).
One of the main reasons is ...
Scientific studies have shown that the most limiting part of typing is being able to translate thought into physical action. The theoretical advantages to Dvorak have not been adequately proven.
FACT: With a QWERTY keyboard, only 30% of your keystrokes will be in the home row.
FACT: With a Dvorak keyboard, over 70% of your keystrokes will be in the home row.
Again, this does not seem to be the major limiting factor to typing speeds.
You can realize for yourself what this means to the average typist.
Nevertheless, it has yet to be proven.
These OSes have a program called xmodmap that makes it simple to switch their keys around.
This doesn't relabel the keys. It doesn't address the fact that no matter what OS you run, you will find yourself at someone else's keyboard. All for advantages that
As for hotkeys, deal with it. It took me about a week to get used to the new keys in vi--they don't have intuitive positions, but realistically, once you get used to them, it doesn't really matter ...
If it doesn't matter where the hot keys are, why does it matter where the other keys are? If the answer is to "get used to it", why bother? Why not "get used to" QWERTY?
> For those unix weenies: take a class in critical thinking before you open your mouth again.
Is this an example of your critical thinking?
> For the record, let me talk a bit of personal experience for those interested.
Critical thinkers do not generally rely on testimonials. Controlled experiments and thoughtful consideration of the literature are hallmarks of critical thinking. Name calling, alas, is not.
> I try not to support stupid things, such as Qwerty, vi, unixism and perl.
Critical thinkers, I fear, do not believe that one can "prove" an opinion.
Yes, QWERTY was originally designed to prevent key jams. But it wasn't adopted as a standard until after the mechanical failings of earlier typewriters had already been overcome. It competed fairly and openly in the market and won its place as a standard based on its merits.
The notion that we are tied to QWERTY because of the mechanical failings of early machines is the myth that the journal article sought to disprove.
First, the article goes to great length to argue that when QWERTY was adopted, it had plenty of competition and the mechanical failures had been overcome before it was a standard. This is not a case of "First Wins" because QWERTY had plenty of competition long before it was adopted. It would have been relatively costless in the early days to change the keyboard layout (and many did), but QWERTY won anyways.
Second, the article argues that there is no CLEAR advantage to Dvorak. One should not adopt new technology with evidence that it is superior, and the evidence for Dvorak has been cooked.
Read the article! There was no "retraining" cost before QWERTY was standard because virtually every machine sold involved training the typist. If training time were shorter or speed much greater, they could have easily outsold Remington.
QWERTY was not a standard until after the mechanical limits were surpassed. QWERTY was adopted much later throughout the world, where standardization simply can't be argued.
Although Dvorak was proposed after QWERTY was adopted, similair layouts did compete (and lose) to QWERTY.
QWERTY was not an immediate standard. Few people knew how to type and virtually every typewriter sold to a business resulted in training. Faster, easier keyboards has plently of opportunity to compete. The mechanical drawbacks of the original QWERTY had already been overcome:
The Blickensderfer used a type-bar configuration similar in principle to the IBM Selectric type ball and, so, could easily offer many different configurations.
QWERTY won on its merits. When the rivals failed, QWERTY was not a standard:
The rival keyboards did ultimately fail, of course.53 But the Qwerty keyboard cannot have been so well established at the time the rival key-boards were first offered that they were rejected because they were non-standard. Manufacturers of typewriters sought and promoted any technical feature that might give them an advantage in the market. Certainly shorter training and greater speed would have been an attractive selling point for a typewriter with an alternative keyboard. Neither can it be said that the rival keyboards were doomed by inferior mechanical characteristics because these companies went on to produce successful and innovative, though Qwerty-based, typing machines. Thus we cannot attribute our inheritance of the Qwerty keyboard to a lack of alternative keyboards or the chance association of this keyboard arrangement with the only mechanically adequate typewriter.
Finally, with no standards or mechanical incentives, QWERTY dominated world markets when it was initially introduced:
We should also take note of the fact that the Qwerty keyboard, although invented in the United States. has become the dominant keyboard throughout the world. Foreign countries, when introduced to typewriters, need not have adopted this keyboard if superior alternatives existed since there would not yet have been any typists trained on Qwerty Yet all other keyboard designs fell before the Qwerty juggernaut.
First, the article *refutes* the claim that you can retrain in 2 weeks. Second, the "cost of converting" is quite a bit more than just the cost of the retraining.
The ergonomic benefits of Dvorak remain unproven.
Typing competitions are not random samples of the population but are rather self-selected samples of people with vested interests in "proving" their product is superior.
Ack! Read the article again. "First wins" is the MYTH that the article refutes. The myth is that the failure to adopt the vastly superior Dvorak layout is a market failure. But the superiority of Dvorak was overstated, the costs are high and the benefits are small. There ARE benefits (or at least there MAY be benefits) with Dvorak, but they simply aren't "worth" it.
PLEASE read the article. Virtually everything you state is a myth, and point of the Economist article (and the Journal article it cites) was to refute these myths.
First, the poster that I was responding to was simply restating the myth that QWERTY was adopted based on an unfair test. In fact, there were several competitions and not all of the competitors were as klunky as ones with pedals or separate keys for upper/lower case.
The "Fable of the Keys" does NOT assert that QWERTY is still the "best" choice (others do make that assertion and argue that tests for Dvorak have been mostly cooked). The central point of the article was that, sometimes, it is NOT economically effecient to adopt a superior technology. The costs of retraining, which Dvorak supporters understate, do not "pay for themselves".
Adoption of a superior technology where the cost of conversion are less than the benefits would be a market failure. QWERTY is simply not such an example. It was not a hastily chosen standard, but was in fact adopted based on its merits (at the time). Dvorak's claims of superiority and ease of conversion have been overstated and THAT is the reason it has not been widely adopted. The costs do not outweight the benefits.
It's not a limit of "thinking" but of converting thoughts into finger movement.
Stenographers aren't typing every letter of every word, which is why they can type faster. They don't have to convert every letter of every word into a neurological impulse.
The Economist article was a summary of journal articles on the subject. The journal article itself has quite a bit of citations to support the claims.
If you'd prefer to rely on testimonial rather than controlled experiments, I guess you're free to do so...
The article itself never asserts that QWERTY is superior, but it does question the claims to contrary.
According to "The Fable of the Keys", there were in fact several early competitions. They argue quite convincingly that QWERTY was adopted on its merits. There main point is not that Dvorak is not superior, but that the costs of switching do not outweigh the benefits.
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
Was the Scientific American story based on the work by Paul David? "The Fable of the Keys" is a refutation of David's work, which has been widely cited as authoritative. If Sci. Am. used David's research, there results would also be flawed.
The "Fable of the Keys" article does a pretty good job of doing original research into the adoption and acceptance of QWERTY.
They do not assert that QWERTY is superior (although they don't necessarily accept it either), but are simply arguing that it would not be benneficial to switch.
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
There are several versions of the claim that a switch to Dvorak would not be worthwhile. The strongest. which we do not make. is that Qwerty is proven to be the best imaginable keyboard. Neither can we claim that Dvorak is proven to be inferior to Qwerty. Our claim is that there is no scientifically acceptable evidence that Dvorak offers any read [sic] advantage over Qwerty. Because of this claim, our assessment of a market failure in this case is rather simple. It might have been more complicated. For example, if Dvorak were found to be superior. it might still be the case that the total social benefits are less than the cost of switching. In that case, we could look for market failure only in the process that started us On the Qwerty keyboard (if the alternative were available at the beginning). Or we might have concluded that Dvorak is better and that all parties could be made better off if we could costlessly command both a switch and any necessary redistribution. Such a finding would constitute a market failure in the sense of mainstream welfare economics. Of course, this circumstance still might not constitute a market in the sense of Demsetz. which requires consideration of the costs of feasible institutions that could efiect the change.
The article *refutes* the assertion that we must overcome the ineffeciency of Dvorak. QWERTY, it seems, is not so ineffecient after all and claims to the contrary come from biased sources. Ergonomic literature argues that QWERTY may, in fact, be superior and the true limits to typing speed are neurological and not the physical speed of are fingers.
The article referred to in the article is at:
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
That was my point. If they claim the GUID is his, he it's very easy to say it was based on a Word doc he wrote 2 years ago.
According to an article on ZDnet:
2 34018,00.html
a -1.html
> However, the unique computer ID is stored in a
> Word document only once -- when the document is
> created. Even if a document is copied to a new
> computer, and saved under a new name, the
> original GUID number does not change.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2
More at Ars Technica:
http://www.arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/2q99/meliss
One of the more common laments over patent law has been over corporations who hold a patent and have no intention of creating a product with it. In some cases, they simply don't want the competition. In other cases, they find that they can make more money simply licensing the patent (and even then, they do so in a limited fashion). Finally, some corpations simply don't have the resources or vision.
In the '60s and '70s, more than 70% of litigated patents were declared invalid. But since the 1980's when Reagan established the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC, the first circuit court with national jurisdiction) the court has been handing out HUGE rewards to patent holders (eg Polariod won an $873 mil. from Kodak). In the current IP climate, owning a patent can be extremely profitable without even developing a product (Honeywell won $93 mil. from Minolta over a patent Honeywell had licensed to Minolta; Honeywell claimed Minolta used a version of the patent in the Maxxum 35mm).
Many firms who hold patents just don't have the vision to see the products that can be created or the ability to market them. Xerox PARC jumps to mind. Many attribute the failure of PARC to the fact that Xerox was a copier company and had no interest in marketing computers.
Because of the potential profitability of patents, firms will patent everything in site, even if they don't have the resources or motivation to develop these inventions. A single entity just doesn't have the time to produce hundreds (or even dozens) of new products every year. They may not "set out" to limit innovation, but that is the end result.
The success of post-it notes was a fluke. Marketing didn't know what they had (the central premise of Dilbert). The engineers discovered it by accident, and realized what they had. They created a bunch of pads and gave them to the executives-- an instant success. When they ran out, the top dogs wanted (NEEDED) more and were told by the engineers that it wasn't really a product. That's what got the ball rolling...
Even the most ardent supporters of patents admit that there is a tradeoff here. Allowing patents, they feel, gives incentive to motivate. But they also realize that they are creating monopolies and that monopolies are, in general, bad for the economy. They don't have competition, and therefore have lost some incentive to improve their products (that does NOT mean that they've lost ALL incentive).
Read the article again. Aspects of the market economy are zero sum. If I'm a customer and I plan to buy a product, I will buy either from Seller A or Seller B, but not both. The game between A and B for my dollar is a zero sum game.
His counter-example in the gift economy isn't quite right, though. He compares a buyer & seller and describes how they both gain (user gets free software, seller gets free debugger). That's true, but no different than the fact that a buyer in the market gets a product and the seller gets money.
It would be more apt to compare two software products. And here it may *still* be a zero sum game. If Program A and Program B (emacs and vim, for example) each benefit from more debuggers, then the competition to get the user to use A or B is identical to the market economy. Only one program will get the user.
> ...led to M$ releasing MS-DOS 5 ...
Yes, that was competition and competition is a good thing. But what about, according the article, the M$ strategy of forcing Hyndai to pay a licensing fee whether or not the computer used M$-DOS.
No one thinks M$ shouldn't try and compete with better products & service. The complaints center around M$ using its current market power to compete *unfairly*.
I believe Futurama makes some joke about the Simpsons still being on the air...
I still get a kick out of the Simpsons. It's not as good as it once was, but still better than 90% of everything on TV. I'm sure Futurama will be better than the Dilbert show.
In what way, exactly, does a flame threaten freedom?
Freedom means being able to say M$ is wonderful, but it also means you can get criticized, berated, called childish names, have funny pictures drawn of your mother, and you may even be ignored (which, frankly, I think most "pro-M$" posters fear the most).
I may not agree with what your bumper sticker says
But I'll defend to death your right to stick it!