That's a matter of opinion. No king stands for long without popular support. A gang of criminals can survive only as long as people are willing to support it.
Of course. A different gang could always rise up and make their leader the new king. This is why the old monarchs were nearly always paranoid -- definitely not nice people by modern standards. However, you haven't invalidated my point that the king was the head of the country's strongest gang at that time. And that feudalism or fascism is overwhelmingly the most likely long-term outcome of libertarianism.
According you your theory, the military and the police should be knocking at my door demanding protection money. But they aren't.
The police don't dare take over because there is an even stronger force: the military. But the counter forces stop at that level. In countries lacking an effective counter to their army, there have been many military coups; Pakistan is only the latest example. If your generals are strong, there is always the risk that they will not stay under control. The U.S. currently finesses the problem by dividing its armed forces into four competing services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines). And to be even safer, there is the National Guard, whose true purpose is to guard against a coup. As a further precaution, the armed forces are constitutionally not permitted to support themselves; they are dependent on funding from Congress. As you can see, the U.S. has multiple safeguards against a violent takeover, and they are all necessary. A libertarian country would have no such safeguards. Beware, beware.
The rule of law and the insurance of personal freedom is of paramount importance to libertarians.
Personal freedom and the rule of law are important to me too. My question is, how do you enforce the law? How do you counter the criminal gangs?
I really would like a defendable answer, because a libertarian country would be a pleasant place to live if it could last.
And yet, the economic structure that has done more to lift all of mankind than any other is fundamentally based on libertarian ideals, as is the governmental structure that lifted the world out of monarchy and dictatorship.
False analogy. Less government, as promulgated by the Constitution of the United States, has been rather successful, so almost no government would be even better, according to you. I strongly disagree, since a libertarian society is unstable.
Also, you vastly underestimate the effectiveness of charitable organizations (to which I, personally, actually give very nearly as much money as I pay in income taxes),...
Your personal generosity is commendable, but that is only one anecdote. Country after country in the Third World have giant economic gaps between the rulers and the peasants, so you would have to work pretty hard to convince me that private charity by itself would be enough to make a significant dent in suffering.
Since any major change of political system is likely to entail a lot of bloodshed, we would need much more convincing evidence than you have hitherto provided before we would put so many lives at risk.
... and vastly overestimate the effectiveness of the welfare state, which has proven to do a better job of creating a permanent underclass than anything else
How do you know this? The U.S. already had an underclass (the blacks) long before the first welfare program. Welfare might have succeeded anyway, except the U.S. had to pay for an incredibly expensive, losing war at the same time as the Great Society. So we'll never know if welfare might have worked if it had been just a bit more generous.
An organized gang doesn't last long in a sane society because there are counter forces (i.e. a strong police). If there are no such counter forces, what's to stop them from growing like cancer? Believe it or not, a medieval king was basically the head of the country's strongest organized gang. This is why I say that a libertarian state will quickly decay into feudalism or fascism.
So a better question would be: who will defend you from pirates? But you'd be hard pressed to find a libertarian who thinks we shouldn't have a navy, or a civil justice system. And yes, I'm sure shipping insurance companies would be happy to fund navy anti-piracy missions.
If you hire a force that is strong enough to stop a large gang, that force is itself strong enough to be a danger to you. In addition, a libertarian country can do little to stop these forces from merging with each other and thereby growing ever mightier. For the almost inevitably dire consequences, see my previous posting.
By the way, thanks for the discussion. If you are libertarian, you are the first I have ever encountered who is willing to talk about the problem of security. All of the others just fall silent -- and the next day I find them spreading their libertarianism once more despite the giant hole I made in it. The same people keep doing it no matter how many times I call them on it. Sigh. Sometimes I think libertarianism is a religion, not a coherent philosophy.
Libertarianism is also unstable: it's extremely likely to decay to fascism or feudalism. A few libertarians know this and are eagerly looking forward to it. The vast bulk of them are too stupid to realize how badly they are being duped.
In a libertarian country, who would prevent the Mafia from taking over? Certainly not the government, which would be so tiny it may as well not exist. Most libertarians have never even considered this vital question. The question is of primary importance because it directly addresses the stability and therefore the durability of a libertarian society.
A few might offer up the feeble answer, "hire a private security firm against the Mafia", but this is not looking far enough ahead. Nothing would prevent these firms from merging with each other or with the Mafia, and growing ever more powerful. And as history teaches us again and again, power corrupts. Eventually, some sufficently merged security firm would become your lord and master, and you would be at its mercy.
Isn't it obvious how easily a libertarian society could descend to feudalism or fascism?
Debian, one of the largest Linux distros (maybe the largest), is completely community driven. It will have desktop support as long as there are programmers using desktop computers.
To a non techie if it doesn't run windows it's not a PC.
A real "non-techie" would have trouble installing their applications on the Eee. Whereas the Linux version of the Eee comes with a full suite of apps. As the word gets out that the Windows version doesn't really "work" but the Linux one does, guess which version will outsell the other.
Now would be a good time for the federal government to lay down fiber to everyone's homes. (The cost? A few months in Iraq.)
The government would own the fiber, but private entities would provide the actual Internet services. The split would prevent the government from doing nasty things, and equally forstall the kind of lock-down by large corporations that you predict.
I don't understand. Why would a 256-byte per paragraph chip have been any more expensive to produce than a 16-byte per paragraph chip?
The first few generations of the slightly bigger architecture could simply drop the upper 4 bits of the linear address, so you would only have 20 bits of address to handle, just as with the actual 8086. You would be feeding the segment number to different bits of the address adder, but that would not cost anything.
Later generations of the chip could handle the full 24-bit address space, and we would not have needed to go through all that expanded/extended memory pain.
If I were the x86 designer, I would not have used paragraphs in the first place. But if I were forced to use paragraphs, I would have gone with kabdib's suggestion: a 256-byte paragraph would have been vastly better.
I never said the government wouldn't exist, nor did I say the police would not exist, etc. I think you are very confused.
Government is coercion. Anything a government does is funded by taxes, which are coercively extracted.
My point is that there will be coercion whether you like it or not, regardless of the political system; even a libertarian country would not stay libertarian for long.
So yes, there will always be lots of "coercing others against their will to bow to [someone's] will" (quoting you here).
If humans are assholes, and don't believe in helping others, then your idea of government is coercing others against their will to bow to your will.
You are going to be coerced anyway. If it's the government being pushy, at least I get to push back with my vote.
In your libertarian world, where the government is so tiny it may as well not exist, who is going to stop the Mafia from demanding "protection money" (i.e. taxes) from you? If your answer is, "I can hire a private security firm", then you are not looking far enough ahead. Remember that there will be nothing to stop these firms from merging and becoming ever more powerful. And history tells us, again and again, that power corrupts. Eventually, you will have little choice but to bend the knee to your local Capo, and he will be your lord and master.
Do you still think there will be no coercion in your libertarian paradise?
Nope, Hillary lost the popular vote -- if you drop the two states (Michigan and Florida) that were banned for breaking the rules of the Democratic Party. Obama did not even campaign in these states; his name was not even on the ballot in Michigan. And very early in the primary season, when Hillary thought she had the nomination in the bag, she herself agreed that Michigan and Florida would not count. She is desperate now, so she goes back on her word and suddenly wants Michigan and Florida reinstated. She wins the popular vote only if you allow her to lie about her earlier rejection of the banned states.
Microsoft will win the OLPC battle but will lose the war.
The OLPC project will die now, because it has thoroughly offended all the idealistic open source people who might have contributed for free. From now on, OLPC will need to pay for its R & D, and this will quickly drain the project's resources. Microsoft will probably make some token gestures but it will not be a savior: the company's goal has been to kill the project. So the OLPC will flame out.
But Microsoft is going to lose the war. OLPC proved that there is a huge and lasting market for an inexpensive and fully functional computer. The hardware cost of these little gadgets is so low that the Microsoft tax becomes a significant burden. Microsoft has enough clout to force a few manufacturers to pay the tax anyway, but these companies will quickly be overwhelmed by those who do not pay the tax. And there will be lots of tax dodgers: the market for the little computers is so huge that Microsoft will be unable to stem the tide.
The consesquences for Microsoft are grim. Cheap computers running Linux will quickly take over the low end of the PC market, then grow upwards. A company as bloated as Microsoft cannot survive for long by charging $3 per machine for Windows and Office. (Office wlll have to be included since the little Linux computers will have OpenOffice.)
Microsoft will slowly starve. The company may never completely disappear, but it is set to shrink drastically in size and influence.
It ought to be considered, therefore, how vain are the faith and promises of those who find themselves deprived of their country.... such is the extreme desire in them to return home, that they naturally believe many things that are false and add many others by art, so that between those they believe and those they say they believe, they fill you with hope, so that relying on them you will incur expenses in vain, or you undertake an enterprise in which you ruin yourself. -- From Discourses, Book 2, Chapter 31
Translation: exiles will say anything in order to enlist your help in returning to power at home. Usually, that means lying.
In terms of credibility, yes. Exiles lie. They have always done so and always will. Whether their cause is good or bad is independent of whether they lie.
Your credibility is null. Funny how you accuse others of nationalist cheer leading while you ignore that 16 of 20 of the world's most polluted cities are in China.
Just as the world's most polluted citie were in the U.S. when the U.S. was developing. Remember the U.S. river that caught on fire? China is actually making an anti-pollution effort at a much earlier stage of development than the U.S. did.
However, this is the perfect time to air our grievances against China.
The U.S. has done plenty to China, from being deeply involved in the Second Opium War (an outright invasion) to bombing a Chinese embassy. In contrast, what has China ever done to the U.S.? What are the legitimate grievances that the U.S. has towards China? Remember, you should only cite legitimate grievances, not the propaganda.
The various stages don't have to happen in the same order. The U.S.A. is definitely entering a fascist stage. Overextended empire, Homeland Security, warrantless wiretaps, obedient, self-censoring media, torture -- these are all signs of a fascist takeover.
You know, the one's that actually bring the bacon for programmers.
Closed source apps from third parties do bring in the bacon -- for a tiny percentage of programmers. The vast majority of programmers could not care less about supporting the lifestyle of that tiny minority.
They don't compete any more. They mandate. Their problem seems to be that OEMs are now following along by releasing systems under their mandate, but also building neat stuff outside the mandate.
Actually, Microsoft probably could force the traditional PC makers into line. MS can cause Dell (for example) a lot of pain, and Dell knows it. So the Dells and HPs of the world will likely comply, and their Linux ventures will be either half-hearted or stillborn.
However, the ultra low cost market is very attractive because it's so new and potentially huge. So there will be competition from nontraditional vendors, including perhaps the consumer electronics giants like Sony and Samsung. Microsoft will have little leverage over these companies, especially when the competition between MS and Sony is already so bitter on multiple fronts (XBox versus Playstation; HD-DVD versus Blu-ray). Linux's low cost is a huge competitive advantage, so I see a total takeover of the low-end computer market by the nontraditional vendors.
Libertarians fall into two general categories: those who know that a libertarian state will quickly morph into fascism or feudalism, and are eagerly looking forward to it; and those who are too stupid to realize this.
That is twice the bandwidth required. That means the "pipes" have to be twice as big to deliver the same level of service as Sweden. Which stands to reason that maybe the cost will already be twice the cost of Sweden?
Nonsense. If Florida has twice the population of Sweden in about the same area, then it also has twice the potential revenue, even before factoring in the higher U.S. average income. So the infrastructure costs should be about the same per capita -- and this is a conservative estimate.
You also assume that the costs of the bandwidth are entirely limited to Florida. What about the fiber linking Florida to the rest of the US?
What about the fiber linking Sweden to the rest of Europe?
Face it, there is really no excuse for such horrible Internet service in the supposedly richest country on earth.
The current regime, as part of its strategy for staying in power, has pumped up Chinese nationalism for decades by shrilly denouncing foreign 'insults'
The Chinese government can denounce "foreign insults" and be believed in China because it is largely telling the truth on this issue.
Example 1. The U.S. missile attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing several Chinese. If China ever tried to repay the favor, say by bombing the huge American embassy in Iraq's Green Zone, what do you think the American reaction would be?
Example 2. Do you remember the spy plane incident in 2001, where an American airplane loaded with electronic snooping hardware was forced to land on Hainan Island in China? The U.S. claimed to have a perfect right to be there, only 70 miles off China's coast. But China was only doing what the U.S. has been doing a long time, namely enforcing a 200-mile airspace interception zone off its coasts. So legally, the Americans had no right to be where they were. If the positions were reversed, if China had been snooping off the U.S. coast, far inside the 200-mile limit, the U.S. reaction would have been explosive, right? Clearly, in doing what it actually did, the U.S. was definitely being pushy and provocative. And this confirms what the Chinese government has been saying about foreign insults.
I do not see MS having an issue with these "Less" Powerful machines. In a year these machines specs will be well within what XP will need to run.
Sure, eventually technology will make even a fat pig like Vista look small and svelte. But Linux will still be slimmer -- and therefore cheaper. If people have the choice between a $200 machine and a $100 machine that does as much or more, guess which one they will pick.
Another problem for Microsoft is that people want their computers to be useful. Windows by itself is rather worthless, unless all you want to do is play Solitaire. People who have Windows will need to spend extra for applications, and that will easily double or triple the cost of their tiny laptops.
In contrast, Linux comes with a full suite of very functional and powerful applications -- and all of it is free.
Of course, Microsoft could upgrade Works to match the functionality -- and price -- of Linux's applications. But if Works became that powerful, who would buy Office? Nobody. MS is in a bind, they know it.
Conclusion: Linux will always have a giant price advantage over Windows.
Ugly as it may be... it's still better than no standard at all.
You don't or won't understand: OOXML is *not* a standard in the sense that people can rely on it for a long, long time. The electrical plug is such standard; we will be using it, essentially unchanged, for hundreds of years. OOXML is so complex and deliberately underspecified that it has and will not have any faithful implementations of it. It's not a standard.
Already the latest generations of Word are having problems opening some 10-year-old documents. Only the totally naive believe that the situation will improve with time, not when Microsoft benefits from breaking old documents: this forces their customers into a perpetual cycle of upgrades.
Microsoft knows that OOXML is a bad standard -- hell, they wrote it specifically to be unimplementable. Which is why the ISO approval process for OOXML was so flagrantly corrupt.
The world cannot and should not standardize on something that breaks every few years. OOXML is worthless.
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Of course. A different gang could always rise up and make their leader the new king. This is why the old monarchs were nearly always paranoid -- definitely not nice people by modern standards. However, you haven't invalidated my point that the king was the head of the country's strongest gang at that time. And that feudalism or fascism is overwhelmingly the most likely long-term outcome of libertarianism.
According you your theory, the military and the police should be knocking at my door demanding protection money. But they aren't.
The police don't dare take over because there is an even stronger force: the military. But the counter forces stop at that level. In countries lacking an effective counter to their army, there have been many military coups; Pakistan is only the latest example. If your generals are strong, there is always the risk that they will not stay under control. The U.S. currently finesses the problem by dividing its armed forces into four competing services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines). And to be even safer, there is the National Guard, whose true purpose is to guard against a coup. As a further precaution, the armed forces are constitutionally not permitted to support themselves; they are dependent on funding from Congress. As you can see, the U.S. has multiple safeguards against a violent takeover, and they are all necessary. A libertarian country would have no such safeguards. Beware, beware.
The rule of law and the insurance of personal freedom is of paramount importance to libertarians.
Personal freedom and the rule of law are important to me too. My question is, how do you enforce the law? How do you counter the criminal gangs?
I really would like a defendable answer, because a libertarian country would be a pleasant place to live if it could last.
False analogy. Less government, as promulgated by the Constitution of the United States, has been rather successful, so almost no government would be even better, according to you. I strongly disagree, since a libertarian society is unstable.
Also, you vastly underestimate the effectiveness of charitable organizations (to which I, personally, actually give very nearly as much money as I pay in income taxes), ...
Your personal generosity is commendable, but that is only one anecdote. Country after country in the Third World have giant economic gaps between the rulers and the peasants, so you would have to work pretty hard to convince me that private charity by itself would be enough to make a significant dent in suffering.
Since any major change of political system is likely to entail a lot of bloodshed, we would need much more convincing evidence than you have hitherto provided before we would put so many lives at risk.
How do you know this? The U.S. already had an underclass (the blacks) long before the first welfare program. Welfare might have succeeded anyway, except the U.S. had to pay for an incredibly expensive, losing war at the same time as the Great Society. So we'll never know if welfare might have worked if it had been just a bit more generous.
So a better question would be: who will defend you from pirates? But you'd be hard pressed to find a libertarian who thinks we shouldn't have a navy, or a civil justice system. And yes, I'm sure shipping insurance companies would be happy to fund navy anti-piracy missions.
If you hire a force that is strong enough to stop a large gang, that force is itself strong enough to be a danger to you. In addition, a libertarian country can do little to stop these forces from merging with each other and thereby growing ever mightier. For the almost inevitably dire consequences, see my previous posting.
By the way, thanks for the discussion. If you are libertarian, you are the first I have ever encountered who is willing to talk about the problem of security. All of the others just fall silent -- and the next day I find them spreading their libertarianism once more despite the giant hole I made in it. The same people keep doing it no matter how many times I call them on it. Sigh. Sometimes I think libertarianism is a religion, not a coherent philosophy.
In a libertarian country, who would prevent the Mafia from taking over? Certainly not the government, which would be so tiny it may as well not exist. Most libertarians have never even considered this vital question. The question is of primary importance because it directly addresses the stability and therefore the durability of a libertarian society.
A few might offer up the feeble answer, "hire a private security firm against the Mafia", but this is not looking far enough ahead. Nothing would prevent these firms from merging with each other or with the Mafia, and growing ever more powerful. And as history teaches us again and again, power corrupts. Eventually, some sufficently merged security firm would become your lord and master, and you would be at its mercy.
Isn't it obvious how easily a libertarian society could descend to feudalism or fascism?
The dollar was much healthier in 2004 than it is now. Not to mention gas prices.
Debian, one of the largest Linux distros (maybe the largest), is completely community driven. It will have desktop support as long as there are programmers using desktop computers.
A real "non-techie" would have trouble installing their applications on the Eee. Whereas the Linux version of the Eee comes with a full suite of apps. As the word gets out that the Windows version doesn't really "work" but the Linux one does, guess which version will outsell the other.
Now would be a good time for the federal government to lay down fiber to everyone's homes. (The cost? A few months in Iraq.)
The government would own the fiber, but private entities would provide the actual Internet services. The split would prevent the government from doing nasty things, and equally forstall the kind of lock-down by large corporations that you predict.
I don't understand. Why would a 256-byte per paragraph chip have been any more expensive to produce than a 16-byte per paragraph chip?
The first few generations of the slightly bigger architecture could simply drop the upper 4 bits of the linear address, so you would only have 20 bits of address to handle, just as with the actual 8086. You would be feeding the segment number to different bits of the address adder, but that would not cost anything.
Later generations of the chip could handle the full 24-bit address space, and we would not have needed to go through all that expanded/extended memory pain.
If I were the x86 designer, I would not have used paragraphs in the first place. But if I were forced to use paragraphs, I would have gone with kabdib's suggestion: a 256-byte paragraph would have been vastly better.
Government is coercion. Anything a government does is funded by taxes, which are coercively extracted.
My point is that there will be coercion whether you like it or not, regardless of the political system; even a libertarian country would not stay libertarian for long.
So yes, there will always be lots of "coercing others against their will to bow to [someone's] will" (quoting you here).
You are going to be coerced anyway. If it's the government being pushy, at least I get to push back with my vote.
In your libertarian world, where the government is so tiny it may as well not exist, who is going to stop the Mafia from demanding "protection money" (i.e. taxes) from you? If your answer is, "I can hire a private security firm", then you are not looking far enough ahead. Remember that there will be nothing to stop these firms from merging and becoming ever more powerful. And history tells us, again and again, that power corrupts. Eventually, you will have little choice but to bend the knee to your local Capo, and he will be your lord and master.
Do you still think there will be no coercion in your libertarian paradise?
Nope, Hillary lost the popular vote -- if you drop the two states (Michigan and Florida) that were banned for breaking the rules of the Democratic Party. Obama did not even campaign in these states; his name was not even on the ballot in Michigan. And very early in the primary season, when Hillary thought she had the nomination in the bag, she herself agreed that Michigan and Florida would not count. She is desperate now, so she goes back on her word and suddenly wants Michigan and Florida reinstated. She wins the popular vote only if you allow her to lie about her earlier rejection of the banned states.
The OLPC project will die now, because it has thoroughly offended all the idealistic open source people who might have contributed for free. From now on, OLPC will need to pay for its R & D, and this will quickly drain the project's resources. Microsoft will probably make some token gestures but it will not be a savior: the company's goal has been to kill the project. So the OLPC will flame out.
But Microsoft is going to lose the war. OLPC proved that there is a huge and lasting market for an inexpensive and fully functional computer. The hardware cost of these little gadgets is so low that the Microsoft tax becomes a significant burden. Microsoft has enough clout to force a few manufacturers to pay the tax anyway, but these companies will quickly be overwhelmed by those who do not pay the tax. And there will be lots of tax dodgers: the market for the little computers is so huge that Microsoft will be unable to stem the tide.
The consesquences for Microsoft are grim. Cheap computers running Linux will quickly take over the low end of the PC market, then grow upwards. A company as bloated as Microsoft cannot survive for long by charging $3 per machine for Windows and Office. (Office wlll have to be included since the little Linux computers will have OpenOffice.)
Microsoft will slowly starve. The company may never completely disappear, but it is set to shrink drastically in size and influence.
In terms of credibility, yes. Exiles lie. They have always done so and always will. Whether their cause is good or bad is independent of whether they lie.
Just as the world's most polluted citie were in the U.S. when the U.S. was developing. Remember the U.S. river that caught on fire? China is actually making an anti-pollution effort at a much earlier stage of development than the U.S. did.
The U.S. has done plenty to China, from being deeply involved in the Second Opium War (an outright invasion) to bombing a Chinese embassy. In contrast, what has China ever done to the U.S.? What are the legitimate grievances that the U.S. has towards China? Remember, you should only cite legitimate grievances, not the propaganda.
See the Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism. The U.S. is showing all of the symptoms. Beware of 6 and 14: these are key to making all of the others possible.
Closed source apps from third parties do bring in the bacon -- for a tiny percentage of programmers. The vast majority of programmers could not care less about supporting the lifestyle of that tiny minority.
Actually, Microsoft probably could force the traditional PC makers into line. MS can cause Dell (for example) a lot of pain, and Dell knows it. So the Dells and HPs of the world will likely comply, and their Linux ventures will be either half-hearted or stillborn.
However, the ultra low cost market is very attractive because it's so new and potentially huge. So there will be competition from nontraditional vendors, including perhaps the consumer electronics giants like Sony and Samsung. Microsoft will have little leverage over these companies, especially when the competition between MS and Sony is already so bitter on multiple fronts (XBox versus Playstation; HD-DVD versus Blu-ray). Linux's low cost is a huge competitive advantage, so I see a total takeover of the low-end computer market by the nontraditional vendors.
Libertarians fall into two general categories: those who know that a libertarian state will quickly morph into fascism or feudalism, and are eagerly looking forward to it; and those who are too stupid to realize this.
Nonsense. If Florida has twice the population of Sweden in about the same area, then it also has twice the potential revenue, even before factoring in the higher U.S. average income. So the infrastructure costs should be about the same per capita -- and this is a conservative estimate.
You also assume that the costs of the bandwidth are entirely limited to Florida. What about the fiber linking Florida to the rest of the US?
What about the fiber linking Sweden to the rest of Europe?
Face it, there is really no excuse for such horrible Internet service in the supposedly richest country on earth.
The Chinese government can denounce "foreign insults" and be believed in China because it is largely telling the truth on this issue.
Example 1. The U.S. missile attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing several Chinese. If China ever tried to repay the favor, say by bombing the huge American embassy in Iraq's Green Zone, what do you think the American reaction would be?
Example 2. Do you remember the spy plane incident in 2001, where an American airplane loaded with electronic snooping hardware was forced to land on Hainan Island in China? The U.S. claimed to have a perfect right to be there, only 70 miles off China's coast. But China was only doing what the U.S. has been doing a long time, namely enforcing a 200-mile airspace interception zone off its coasts. So legally, the Americans had no right to be where they were. If the positions were reversed, if China had been snooping off the U.S. coast, far inside the 200-mile limit, the U.S. reaction would have been explosive, right? Clearly, in doing what it actually did, the U.S. was definitely being pushy and provocative. And this confirms what the Chinese government has been saying about foreign insults.
Sure, eventually technology will make even a fat pig like Vista look small and svelte. But Linux will still be slimmer -- and therefore cheaper. If people have the choice between a $200 machine and a $100 machine that does as much or more, guess which one they will pick.
Another problem for Microsoft is that people want their computers to be useful. Windows by itself is rather worthless, unless all you want to do is play Solitaire. People who have Windows will need to spend extra for applications, and that will easily double or triple the cost of their tiny laptops.
In contrast, Linux comes with a full suite of very functional and powerful applications -- and all of it is free.
Of course, Microsoft could upgrade Works to match the functionality -- and price -- of Linux's applications. But if Works became that powerful, who would buy Office? Nobody. MS is in a bind, they know it.
Conclusion: Linux will always have a giant price advantage over Windows.
You don't or won't understand: OOXML is *not* a standard in the sense that people can rely on it for a long, long time. The electrical plug is such standard; we will be using it, essentially unchanged, for hundreds of years. OOXML is so complex and deliberately underspecified that it has and will not have any faithful implementations of it. It's not a standard.
Already the latest generations of Word are having problems opening some 10-year-old documents. Only the totally naive believe that the situation will improve with time, not when Microsoft benefits from breaking old documents: this forces their customers into a perpetual cycle of upgrades.
Microsoft knows that OOXML is a bad standard -- hell, they wrote it specifically to be unimplementable. Which is why the ISO approval process for OOXML was so flagrantly corrupt.
The world cannot and should not standardize on something that breaks every few years. OOXML is worthless.