Actually, my original words were "Wake me when Google starts being remotely monopolistic", which is just vague enough to let me make my point, I think.:) "-stic" means "acting like", just like "fanatastic" means "acting like the Fanta girls (whether in drag, or otherwise)".
Anyway, the legal definition of tying is making purchase of one product conditional on another, eg. forced bundling. Google isn't doing this, since any single product of theirs can be used completely independently of any of their other products (except for their chef and masseuse, unfortunately).
De Beers. Marketshare = 40%. Negative influence? yes.
Okay, so most dictionaries define "monopoly" to be an almost complete lack of competition. Still, most people aren't concerned with the monopoly itself, but rather what negative things it can do. And it doesn't take 95% marketshare to have a coercive and negative impact on a free market.
A company is not required to be 100% open to be cool. Most companies don't contribute anything to open source, yet are still perfectly non-evil companies. Contributing to open source and using open protocols is just one of many possible ways a company can indicate that they're not evil.
Similarly, tying on a low level is practically a necessity. Some linux distros make their money by offering software support for a fee. They offset the cost of the work they do on the distros by being able to mention their support service in the product literature.
Similarly, Google offers many services for free, and the primary way they make money is by using their good name to offer other services at the same time.
Yes, we're talking about two different things, we don't need to argue anymore.
"Monopolistic" = actions that might lead to prosecution under antitrust laws (either tying to artificially expand your marketshare of a different product, or lock-in to artificially retain or expand your marketshare in the current market). "Monopoly" = one of the best-selling commercial board games in the world. Err, I mean, "Monopoly" = a general lack of competition, or even simply enough marketshare to be able to influence prices (eg. OPEC or De Beers, both of which control less than 50% of the market, but are still seen as having a negative influence on the market).
Please note the word "local", which is only a small portion of the search market. That link was included because the same story covered general search marketshare a little further down. I assumed people would be smart enough to sort it out.
We're talking about being the gatekeeper for the majority of information retrieved via the net.
So is Comcast Cable. So is Yahoo DSL. So is Cisco. Microsoft controls the TCP stack for most of the consumers on the internet, so they're part of the same ballgame. Note that controlling the TCP flow is much more important than controlling high-level data flowing over it. The great firewall of China is mainly built with the help of Cisco-like companies, not with the help of Google-like companies.
If any of these companies started doing anything remotely crazy, companies would leave them quickly at the very least, and eventually consumers would start leaving them because they're unreliable (for the same reason that people switched from suspicious portals to Google in the first place). Also, if they did anything remotely politically unpalatable (eg. anything other than block porn), congresscriters would be all over them.
Like your statement that you need to abuse your monopoly to be a monopolist. So what does that make all those companies that have a monopoly and don't abuse it?
Um, Google-vs-MS is a canonical examples obvious example of this, but if you really need it to be explained...
Google naturally became the huge marketshare leader because its product was so damn good. This is a good thing for the little people.
Microsoft may have naturally come upon its OS leadership (there's no need to argue over that for this discussion). Microsoft then continued and tried to use its huge marketshare in the OS world to gain a majority marketshare in several other businesses: office suites, vsideo/audio player, ISP, internet browser, etc. Especially in the case of the browser, it seemes that if MS would not have had the OS dominance that it had, it wouldn't have been able to gain dominance in browsers. MS also got exclusive deals with computer manufacturers (and/or required them to pay for an MS Windows license even if windows was not sold on that machine) to try to maintain its marketshare in the OS market, and artificially supressed competitor OS's from doing very well in the market. (arguably, there are natural pressures that encourages the market to settle upon a single standard, but in actively going beyond that, Microsoft was acting against the best interests of consumers).
Now, if a real competitor to Google pops up, and Google starts using its largess to hinder its competitors, then that's a problem. If, instead, Google decides to not be evil, and focuses on making the best search engine they know how, and allows the marketplace to choose whichever search product is the best, then google will have no problem, no matter how large its marketshare becomes.
Story is invaluable for certain kinds of games. But they are a vast range of other kinds of games which don't require story-line at all to be successful. They also don't require fancy graphics. But they still DO require excellent game design to be highly successful (eg. katamari damacy, world of warcraft, minesweeper, sega tennis, NFL football,...).
Wake me up when Google a) starts being remotely monopolistic, or b) drops their support for open source.
IBM is cool now because they're actively 1) paying for linux advertising (related to IBM, but still), 2) writing lots of Linux articles, 3) contributing to linux, etc etc.
Google Talk is cool because it uses an open, standardized protocol. You can't really go after Google under the Sherman Act for using the Jabber protocol.
It's still possible for Google's management to change, and for them to start leveraging their massive marketshare in a way that directly inhibits search engine competitors. Until they try something like this though, I'm going to sleep well.
(and note that MS is still, by far, the least likely to contribute to open source, or even seriously grok open standard protocols)
Ooooh. So that's why Pacman and Super Mario Bros were such memorable games. (and pong, and commander keen, and chess, and mario kart, and baseball, and poker,...)
Unix Power Tools, chapter 23 covers a lot of pitfalls of rm, and many many ways to address them (though the ones you mentioned are some of the best).
(while I'm including a semi-evil link, let me say that Unix Power Tools is one of the best books ever written, and if you're just starting to learn unix, it will significantly boost your learning curve, AND it doubles as a great bludgeoning weapon)
"Sonar over IP" = Ping "smell over IP" = sniff your fellow slashdotters "spatula over IP" = Dinner-by-wire, ala Star Trek "spigot over IP" = everybody's shipping low-cost computers to the third world anyway... this way computers are actually useful "spouse over IP" = for people who've never left the computer "stamp over IP" = USPS is afraid of email cutting into their profits "Soviet over IP" = In soviet russia, IP stacks on top of you! "sunlight over IP" = computer geeks are tired of the stigma of being pasty white
Speaking from a non-corporate perspective, MP3 was probably the real first beachhead, with the iPod, XBox Media Center, and podcasting enhancing IP's reach into the world.
8 year olds constantly interrupt you and beg you to give them free gold, give them water, "teleport" them somewhere, lockpick their chest, etc
people yell so loudly that others can hear them for blocks around, and they choose to only yell about inane stupid things
every once in a while, someone tries to sell something for 20 times its market price, and 40 people suddenly show up solely for the purpose of heckling them
At one point, Transmeta was promising to be able to change the CPU on-the-fly from an x86 to other things (eg. ARM, MIPS), which is no problem, since it was doing the x86=>native translation anyway, all it has to do is change to a different translation.
So, all Intel needs to do is make the CPU be able to be switched from x86 to PPC at runtime. That's why Apple claims they can run old apps so quickly.
You just need to throw in enough buzzwords, like "cell-based turtles" and "multicore Transmeta overlords", and you'd definitely have a good shot at the front page.
Duh, they're somewhat related, they walk/talk/smell like a duck.
Duh, they're not the same. They're orders of magnitude different in terms of bps, which means that internally, they're very different. BPL seems closer to 2.4GHz wireless equipment than anything.
RS232 and Ethernet both use PLL's, but people still don't lump them in the same class because they're orders of magnitude different.
Except that X10 has a latency on the order of seconds, bitrate on the order of bps, and STILL gets interfered with from other things on the electrical lines.
Not to mention that the IOC was pretty brutish with the "ambush marketing" concept in Athens in 2004. I haven't heard anybody else use the term except for the IOC.
You must work in a different corporate america than I do. My biggest hope is that my company doesn't enforce their "all your copyright are belong to us" policy, wherein every little unix script I write, no matter how small, and even if nobody at the company will ever make money off of it or even use it, can't be taken with me to my next job.
In Fortune-100-America, everything possible must be stamped with a (c) or (tm) or patent#. Advancement up the technical ladder is difficult without getting a few patents for the company.
I think people here would have a heart attack if they knew I ever even thought about GPL'ing code, as that's almost tantamount to selling trade secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, the legal definition of tying is making purchase of one product conditional on another, eg. forced bundling. Google isn't doing this, since any single product of theirs can be used completely independently of any of their other products (except for their chef and masseuse, unfortunately).
De Beers. Marketshare = 40%. Negative influence? yes.
Okay, so most dictionaries define "monopoly" to be an almost complete lack of competition. Still, most people aren't concerned with the monopoly itself, but rather what negative things it can do. And it doesn't take 95% marketshare to have a coercive and negative impact on a free market.
A company is not required to be 100% open to be cool. Most companies don't contribute anything to open source, yet are still perfectly non-evil companies. Contributing to open source and using open protocols is just one of many possible ways a company can indicate that they're not evil.
Similarly, tying on a low level is practically a necessity. Some linux distros make their money by offering software support for a fee. They offset the cost of the work they do on the distros by being able to mention their support service in the product literature.
Similarly, Google offers many services for free, and the primary way they make money is by using their good name to offer other services at the same time.
"Monopolistic" = actions that might lead to prosecution under antitrust laws (either tying to artificially expand your marketshare of a different product, or lock-in to artificially retain or expand your marketshare in the current market). "Monopoly" = one of the best-selling commercial board games in the world. Err, I mean, "Monopoly" = a general lack of competition, or even simply enough marketshare to be able to influence prices (eg. OPEC or De Beers, both of which control less than 50% of the market, but are still seen as having a negative influence on the market).
Please note the word "local", which is only a small portion of the search market. That link was included because the same story covered general search marketshare a little further down. I assumed people would be smart enough to sort it out.
So is Comcast Cable. So is Yahoo DSL. So is Cisco. Microsoft controls the TCP stack for most of the consumers on the internet, so they're part of the same ballgame. Note that controlling the TCP flow is much more important than controlling high-level data flowing over it. The great firewall of China is mainly built with the help of Cisco-like companies, not with the help of Google-like companies.
If any of these companies started doing anything remotely crazy, companies would leave them quickly at the very least, and eventually consumers would start leaving them because they're unreliable (for the same reason that people switched from suspicious portals to Google in the first place). Also, if they did anything remotely politically unpalatable (eg. anything other than block porn), congresscriters would be all over them.
similar statistics...
Um, Google-vs-MS is a canonical examples obvious example of this, but if you really need it to be explained...
Google naturally became the huge marketshare leader because its product was so damn good. This is a good thing for the little people.
Microsoft may have naturally come upon its OS leadership (there's no need to argue over that for this discussion). Microsoft then continued and tried to use its huge marketshare in the OS world to gain a majority marketshare in several other businesses: office suites, vsideo/audio player, ISP, internet browser, etc. Especially in the case of the browser, it seemes that if MS would not have had the OS dominance that it had, it wouldn't have been able to gain dominance in browsers. MS also got exclusive deals with computer manufacturers (and/or required them to pay for an MS Windows license even if windows was not sold on that machine) to try to maintain its marketshare in the OS market, and artificially supressed competitor OS's from doing very well in the market. (arguably, there are natural pressures that encourages the market to settle upon a single standard, but in actively going beyond that, Microsoft was acting against the best interests of consumers).
Now, if a real competitor to Google pops up, and Google starts using its largess to hinder its competitors, then that's a problem. If, instead, Google decides to not be evil, and focuses on making the best search engine they know how, and allows the marketplace to choose whichever search product is the best, then google will have no problem, no matter how large its marketshare becomes.
Story is invaluable for certain kinds of games. But they are a vast range of other kinds of games which don't require story-line at all to be successful. They also don't require fancy graphics. But they still DO require excellent game design to be highly successful (eg. katamari damacy, world of warcraft, minesweeper, sega tennis, NFL football, ...).
IBM is cool now because they're actively 1) paying for linux advertising (related to IBM, but still), 2) writing lots of Linux articles, 3) contributing to linux, etc etc.
Google Talk is cool because it uses an open, standardized protocol. You can't really go after Google under the Sherman Act for using the Jabber protocol.
It's still possible for Google's management to change, and for them to start leveraging their massive marketshare in a way that directly inhibits search engine competitors. Until they try something like this though, I'm going to sleep well.
(and note that MS is still, by far, the least likely to contribute to open source, or even seriously grok open standard protocols)
Ooooh. So that's why Pacman and Super Mario Bros were such memorable games. (and pong, and commander keen, and chess, and mario kart, and baseball, and poker, ...)
We've already given in to our Soviet rocket overlords by ditching the shuttle's airplane-like design. Now taking a giant U-turn on CPU's would increase the irony so much more. All we need now is for Ariel Sharon to accuse George Bush of stealing their ideas, and the irony would be complete.
(while I'm including a semi-evil link, let me say that Unix Power Tools is one of the best books ever written, and if you're just starting to learn unix, it will significantly boost your learning curve, AND it doubles as a great bludgeoning weapon)
"Sonar over IP" = Ping
"smell over IP" = sniff your fellow slashdotters
"spatula over IP" = Dinner-by-wire, ala Star Trek
"spigot over IP" = everybody's shipping low-cost computers to the third world anyway... this way computers are actually useful
"spouse over IP" = for people who've never left the computer
"stamp over IP" = USPS is afraid of email cutting into their profits
"Soviet over IP" = In soviet russia, IP stacks on top of you!
"sunlight over IP" = computer geeks are tired of the stigma of being pasty white
Speaking from a non-corporate perspective, MP3 was probably the real first beachhead, with the iPod, XBox Media Center, and podcasting enhancing IP's reach into the world.
At one point, Transmeta was promising to be able to change the CPU on-the-fly from an x86 to other things (eg. ARM, MIPS), which is no problem, since it was doing the x86=>native translation anyway, all it has to do is change to a different translation.
So, all Intel needs to do is make the CPU be able to be switched from x86 to PPC at runtime. That's why Apple claims they can run old apps so quickly.
You just need to throw in enough buzzwords, like "cell-based turtles" and "multicore Transmeta overlords", and you'd definitely have a good shot at the front page.
Duh, they're not the same. They're orders of magnitude different in terms of bps, which means that internally, they're very different. BPL seems closer to 2.4GHz wireless equipment than anything.
RS232 and Ethernet both use PLL's, but people still don't lump them in the same class because they're orders of magnitude different.
Better than that, hopefully we'll get mars.google.com in 7 months. (0.3m is better resolution than even google maps)
Except that X10 has a latency on the order of seconds, bitrate on the order of bps, and STILL gets interfered with from other things on the electrical lines.
Well, Pan-American is supposedly out in the US. Though that can't be 100% right, since there's that whole, you know, Pan American airline.
Not to mention that the IOC was pretty brutish with the "ambush marketing" concept in Athens in 2004. I haven't heard anybody else use the term except for the IOC.
See 36 USC 220506... the US has had the same law for a long time. The Olympic commitee has even tried to be quite heavy-handed about it, on more than one occasion.
In Fortune-100-America, everything possible must be stamped with a (c) or (tm) or patent#. Advancement up the technical ladder is difficult without getting a few patents for the company.
I think people here would have a heart attack if they knew I ever even thought about GPL'ing code, as that's almost tantamount to selling trade secrets.