I think they are refering to producers of the fruit, if all the sellers have fruit that lasts for a week and the buyers are the only ones with refridgeration, sellers will sell at lower prices to get the fruit off their hands before it spoils, this gives sellers signficantly more negotiating leverage.
It's pretty simple, the public investor is willing to pay more (In management's mind much more than the company is worth). In reality the vast majority of public tech companies have no need to be public, as they have been self funding since startup. However, there are many self funding companies that have gone public. This suggests other things might be motivating them. The first is it's cheap advertising. Would Amazon have become a dominant retailer if they hadn't been the internet darling of the media? They'd be a small, successful bookseller who ships hard to find books to geeks. The value of the free advertising from the business press has to be enormous. Second, the investing public belives that technology companies are the road to riches (as they were 25 years ago when no one believed that America was innovative anymore) and has as a result bid up the price of such companies into the stratosphere, again. When people pay to much for something, they get more of it delivered to them. Why not sell you can always go private in a decade or two after the buzz has gone away.
So double your estimate that's a million dollars for something that will service 1 million accounts (and likely more as they can oversell to some extent. If each account gets 5-10 emails they look at per day, and each page has 3 ads that's 15-30 views every day for 4 years (3-5 yrs is the "lifespan" of a PC). That's 15 billion ad views for a million dollar investment (of course you have some additional on going costs like electricity, management, any software updates). Seems like they could make money doing this. If it tests the next gen architecture too, all the better.
Don't forget that they've had a rash of bad news regarding new and additional competitors in search, just before their IPO. This gives them an innovative, heady project that puts the company in a much better light to retail investors (who they will need bidding up the stock price after the IPO). Their most important product sale (in the coming months) could be partial ownership of the company to outsiders.
Washington has for a long, long time raided the social security "trust" but no one would do anything about it. I hope that Greenspan's bringing up the elephant in the living room brings real examination and change to the system that is slowly breaking. It will be an interesting next couple of decades.
That statement depends on what your estimate of tax cheating is, if we knew we'd just collect the taxes. Also, most of the cheating is from the black market mostly illegal transactions and such, if we catch those cheats the governement is not simply going to collect the taxes and go along their merry way.
Which is why we have punative damages (to make a few of those cases large enough to offset Y which was the amount saved not doing a recall). However this has led to a new problem the very powerful trial lawyers (who collect 1/3 of Y in each victory, which is the driver behind the explosion in suits we've had over the past 30 years. Y is large on a corporate scale, by design (it's positivly huge on an individual or even law firm scale).
MBA degrees, with the exception of some finance, and some operations programs*, are basically just a method to qualify for better jobs, they don't teach much more than an undergrad business degree, and are used for signaling to employers that I worked by butt of getting this degree and sacrificed mightily for my career (implying I'll do the same for you).
*The exceptions would be quant based finance programs and operations that requred progression through stats and likely some of the lower level engineering classes. Check out the math required for a UofChicago MBA in Finance.
Software is complex like many manufactured goods, (think car engines or buildings) how come cars can be made generally bug free or bugs are the responsibility of the manufacturer but software is generally taken to be impossible to make perfect? I'm not a computer scientist and my ability to code is only slightly more than the occasional script or applet, so please forgive my ignorance. I would have thought that quality issues were a factor of newness rather than impossibility.
One of the best business thinkers, Porter, belives that there are only two methods of competiton differentiation (making a product better than others) or cost (making a product cheaper than others). Apple and Dell are both successful examples of these two methods. Gateway is neither and keeps vacillating between the two strategies. Even if you are a brand name you have to either deliver more quality or lower costs (not always translated into lower prices, a good example is Anheiser Busch who has lower costs but keeps prices similar to its higher cost rivals).
Wall St. is pretty democratic, they may serve the predomently republican managements but in the trading pits you have a few of every bent, but it's mostly dems. As an anecdote, look at Kudlow and Cramer (but quickly) Kudlow is the swarmy business republican (even I can't stand those guys, they would be flaming libs, but swapped business for welfare moms) and Cramer is a big Democrat fund raiser who is slowly becoming more libertarian.
I agree with the absurdity of the role reversal in the common mind between Dems and Repubs. Part of the issue might be the shrinking amount of difference between the two parties these days, it seems important but take a step back and see how similar they are.
There is a cashier at a local store whose name is B not Bea or Bee just B. Perhaps these two should hook up. I'd welcome our seasame street bringing overlords.
Unlike Perl Python and the others Java scared the crap out of MS management about the time of the adoption of the internet. They are smart enough to know that the reason Windows sells so well is that there are huge network effects (the system becomes more valuable the more users you have) to operating systems. ie developers write for the platform that has the most potential users and users choose the platform with the most software. MS figured this out early and ran with it. They saw Java as a new platform that didn't care what you ran underneath it (Windows, Solaris, MacOS) they all run Java progams fine. Taken to it's extreme it means the OS is merely an interface between Java programs and hardware (since Java would be the method of software delivery users would choose the cheapest OS that enabled Java or the one that ran it best, SUN). MS obviously didn't want this to occur without a good fight so they purposely broke the Java standard with their own Java VM that added a bunch of features specific to Windows. This meant that there were effectivly two types of Java SUN's and MS's and software written for MS Java wouldn't work on SUN's JVM. Since MS could easily bring hundreds of millions of users to their JVM they won that battle. That's a big reason why they got into the last round of anti-trust hot water both here and in Europe. The browser wars would have been better termed the JAVA wars. It's also why SUN has been on a Quixotic quest to destroy MS's monopoly.
I think part of it is that they are a bit more aggressive about enforcing their worldview on customers (things like owning their own music company and selling only edited music) that bothers a healthy segment of the population. Also, ever since Sam died, they haven't tried very hard to put forward a good public face, they sort of take the driven view of the world (there is the stuff we "own" and the stuff we don't own yet). While the attitude is shared at most fortune 500 companies, the public display of that attitude is frowned upon outside of Wall Street circles.
Another difference is that Wal~Mart has historically operated in smaller towns in the country while KMart/Target/and others are moving down from the more densely populated parts of the country. The stores that the other discounters put out of business (Penny's, Sears, Monkey Wards etc) were all much bigger competitors who know how the game is played unlike the smaller mom & pops who scream bloody murder about Walmart and either figured out how to compete or were gone by the time Target came to their town.
More recently the company has come under a ton of fire from the Unions who would like to unionize the millions of employees Wal~Mart has and are very threatened at the unionized (grocery) retailers who cannot afford to pay union benefits to the number of employees they have and match Wal~Mart's prices. The union's haven't had much success at unionizing Wal~Mart so they are trying to make them look bad reducing competitive pressure on the unionized grocery stores.
Personally I prefer the convinence, selection, and short lines at my grocery to Wal~Mart, but go there or target for the hardlines stuff.
Thanks, I might just give that a run Windows was pretty pricy for a tiny OEM trying to sell sub $500 systems. I do think these are only avalible from WalMart.com (like the Lindows and Mandrake systems before) but it does seem like a great move by SUN to offer a nice computer to run OpenOffice. I'll have to give it a try.
The Java Desktop is a subscriber product did Wal~Mart get a discount due to expected volume or does the end user have to pay an annual maintenance fee for updates. IIRC it was $50-$100 per year depending on if you got it during the big sale (possibly still in progress). Having to pay that sort of maintenece costs would seem to push users toward Mandrake.
I'm actually curious because I had the same idea, but didn't investigate it far enough to see if SUN was willing to cut OEM customers a break. It would be nice to advertise a SUN operating system that everyone is hearing so much about rather than the scary (to small customers) Linux.
I don't know if even 1 was great the real world seemed to register more than it's share of complaints back in the day. I did enjoy one episode of Road Rules the spoiled rich kids were supposed to lead some cows to town. Anyway they got down to four or five kids on horseback and one yearling calf who eventually bolted and ran into a grove of maybe 20 trees. They of course couldn't get it out and rode on to town. The best part was by the time they rode into town the ranch hands had rounded up all the cows they lost and were waiting for them at the corral with the cows they were supposed to bring. Now that's funny. I catch a few shows at friends houses, but prefer DSL and wasting time online to wasting time watching TV. There is a show on Spike that takes odd Japanese game shows and redubs them it seems to be hit and miss, but when it hits it's pretty good.
So I got stuck with the musical instrument design as well. I built a guitar took forever (I'd guess 50-100 hrs with no wood finishing). The difficulty was that I never found good stable tuning assemblies I tried with screws but tuning was difficult with finger tightening assemblies you didn't have enough friction to hold them in place for more than a few minutes. It was an accoustic and I used several strands of thin wire (but only played one). The best instrument was a trombone made out of PVC pipe, it actually sounded pretty good. Our team stunk but road ralley and bridge building made up for it (1st and 2nd respecivly). Still have (and use the calc I won) good times.
I thought bin Ladin was all about getting infidels out of Saudi Arabia. I can certainly see why this is a sticky situation what with the entire western economic system dependant on a ruling house that is tottering about and hated by its people. You are correct that other Islamic terrorists would like to see us end our support of Israel. I think the percieved degeneracy (is that a word?) in the western world is a big factor in their hatred of us, too.
To avoid confusion in the US we started calling liberalism libertarianism or classical liberalism. Liberal became associated with the 60s leftists and has been a dirty word to small government types on this side of the pond ever since. Anyone who likes the economist can't be all bad, those captions are the funniest thing I read.
Actually they are laws because it's cheaper to pass a law and have a few specialists enforce it than it is for each individual to protect themselves. Look at the Mafia, if you whack a mob boss will they go to the police and report a crime? No they protect themselves with a code of retribution. It works (how often do mob folks get hit?) but it's a huge burden (you have to arm your guards and spend a ton of effort ensuring that you have the backing to retaliate against anyone who messes with your business. It's much cheaper to say this is alwasy illegal and if you violate the law you will be punished by independant specialists. Both systems have their flaws, but seem to work most of the time. The legal system while slow and costly is a whole lot less costly (fewer layers of middlemen and time spent negotiating).
I highly doubt that the Israeli's will backstab us they are one of the few countries that can reliably be counted on to stick with us in good times and bad. I'd add the British to the list too. They are more of a mentor who can take the angry kid to the side and say you might want to think a bit before you act but if you act we've got your back. The Israelis and the US have been allies since Israel was founded and there are lot's of Jewish people in the US who are very likely to maintain the close ties. When we dealt with the Afgan rebels we had a pretty good idea that this might well come back and bite us (especially once the stinger lanchers started moving through Pakistan to Iran) but the decsion was that it would be better for Islamists to be strong than the Soviet Union. We'll find out if that bet was right over the next several decades.
I think it's the mindset that draws someone to programming. It's a worldview that looks at the world trying to connect patterns rather than seeing specific instances. Most of the mindset does very well in the sciences because to that mind set all pythagorean theorum problems are applications of a consistant pattern rather than individual equations to be solved (which is how other mindsets view math and science). As a result they tend to think about things like standards and look for other cases in which standards apply. It's one of the reasons that they love to learn as once a pattern is learned all future problems are just an application of the pattern rather than new patterns to be learned.
The root cause of the S&L bankruptcies was S&L's making uneconomic loans to developers who were after the old limited partnership real estate tax deductions. Once the tax deductions were reomoved (years before) real estate prices crashed and the S&Ls that had only real estate loans followed suit. So the whole thing was caused by poor tax code and then changes to that poor tax code. Not that regulation isn't neccessary just that the best method to regulate is to have it done by those with a financial interest in the outcome. In an ideal world the owners of Enron would have hired their own audit team to comb through management's financials looking for fudging. However since auditing has positive externalities that are difficult to enforce (if Vangard performs audits Fidelity could benefit from the results without paying their share of the costs) we toss the whole thing to governments who make rules that change the incentive set for managment and auditors (never to quite what the owners would have but closer) and hope for the best.
Ideally consumers would be in a position to negotiate with their financial institution regarding privacy disclosures, but since it is still too costly we use laws like GLB to reduce those costs of individually negotiatin what privacy disclosures are acceptible and what are not.
Standards are a very valuble thing for all invovled just look at the PC industry and internet (an older example is fasteners, nuts and bolts) as examples of how a standard can be very very useful. However it makes it very difficult to compete (since all the products meet the standard. Because of this value owning the rights to a standard is highly sought look at IBM, Visa, Microsoft, and Rambus' attempts just a few top of my head examples of companies or organizaitons that have profited from their control of a standard.
The balancing point lies in giving companies an incentive to work together for standards based solutions while preserving some rewards for developing a standard (and eventually passing it on to an open group). Imagine either of two senarios we still paid US Steel (or anther company) per SAE bolt wrench or socket produced or we had 50 slightly different patterns for fasteners. Neither solution is ideal the balance comes from giving the originator of a standard a decent return for their innovation with the tremendous gains from having an open standard.
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I think they are refering to producers of the fruit, if all the sellers have fruit that lasts for a week and the buyers are the only ones with refridgeration, sellers will sell at lower prices to get the fruit off their hands before it spoils, this gives sellers signficantly more negotiating leverage.
It's pretty simple, the public investor is willing to pay more (In management's mind much more than the company is worth). In reality the vast majority of public tech companies have no need to be public, as they have been self funding since startup.
However, there are many self funding companies that have gone public. This suggests other things might be motivating them. The first is it's cheap advertising. Would Amazon have become a dominant retailer if they hadn't been the internet darling of the media? They'd be a small, successful bookseller who ships hard to find books to geeks. The value of the free advertising from the business press has to be enormous.
Second, the investing public belives that technology companies are the road to riches (as they were 25 years ago when no one believed that America was innovative anymore) and has as a result bid up the price of such companies into the stratosphere, again. When people pay to much for something, they get more of it delivered to them. Why not sell you can always go private in a decade or two after the buzz has gone away.
So double your estimate that's a million dollars for something that will service 1 million accounts (and likely more as they can oversell to some extent. If each account gets 5-10 emails they look at per day, and each page has 3 ads that's 15-30 views every day for 4 years (3-5 yrs is the "lifespan" of a PC). That's 15 billion ad views for a million dollar investment (of course you have some additional on going costs like electricity, management, any software updates). Seems like they could make money doing this. If it tests the next gen architecture too, all the better.
Don't forget that they've had a rash of bad news regarding new and additional competitors in search, just before their IPO. This gives them an innovative, heady project that puts the company in a much better light to retail investors (who they will need bidding up the stock price after the IPO). Their most important product sale (in the coming months) could be partial ownership of the company to outsiders.
Your second statement is the most insightful one on /. since I started reading years ago. We truely have the government we deserve.
Washington has for a long, long time raided the social security "trust" but no one would do anything about it. I hope that Greenspan's bringing up the elephant in the living room brings real examination and change to the system that is slowly breaking. It will be an interesting next couple of decades.
That statement depends on what your estimate of tax cheating is, if we knew we'd just collect the taxes. Also, most of the cheating is from the black market mostly illegal transactions and such, if we catch those cheats the governement is not simply going to collect the taxes and go along their merry way.
Which is why we have punative damages (to make a few of those cases large enough to offset Y which was the amount saved not doing a recall). However this has led to a new problem the very powerful trial lawyers (who collect 1/3 of Y in each victory, which is the driver behind the explosion in suits we've had over the past 30 years. Y is large on a corporate scale, by design (it's positivly huge on an individual or even law firm scale).
MBA degrees, with the exception of some finance, and some operations programs*, are basically just a method to qualify for better jobs, they don't teach much more than an undergrad business degree, and are used for signaling to employers that I worked by butt of getting this degree and sacrificed mightily for my career (implying I'll do the same for you).
*The exceptions would be quant based finance programs and operations that requred progression through stats and likely some of the lower level engineering classes. Check out the math required for a UofChicago MBA in Finance.
Software is complex like many manufactured goods, (think car engines or buildings) how come cars can be made generally bug free or bugs are the responsibility of the manufacturer but software is generally taken to be impossible to make perfect? I'm not a computer scientist and my ability to code is only slightly more than the occasional script or applet, so please forgive my ignorance. I would have thought that quality issues were a factor of newness rather than impossibility.
One of the best business thinkers, Porter, belives that there are only two methods of competiton differentiation (making a product better than others) or cost (making a product cheaper than others). Apple and Dell are both successful examples of these two methods. Gateway is neither and keeps vacillating between the two strategies. Even if you are a brand name you have to either deliver more quality or lower costs (not always translated into lower prices, a good example is Anheiser Busch who has lower costs but keeps prices similar to its higher cost rivals).
Wall St. is pretty democratic, they may serve the predomently republican managements but in the trading pits you have a few of every bent, but it's mostly dems. As an anecdote, look at Kudlow and Cramer (but quickly) Kudlow is the swarmy business republican (even I can't stand those guys, they would be flaming libs, but swapped business for welfare moms) and Cramer is a big Democrat fund raiser who is slowly becoming more libertarian.
I agree with the absurdity of the role reversal in the common mind between Dems and Repubs. Part of the issue might be the shrinking amount of difference between the two parties these days, it seems important but take a step back and see how similar they are.
There is a cashier at a local store whose name is B not Bea or Bee just B. Perhaps these two should hook up. I'd welcome our seasame street bringing overlords.
Unlike Perl Python and the others Java scared the crap out of MS management about the time of the adoption of the internet. They are smart enough to know that the reason Windows sells so well is that there are huge network effects (the system becomes more valuable the more users you have) to operating systems. ie developers write for the platform that has the most potential users and users choose the platform with the most software. MS figured this out early and ran with it. They saw Java as a new platform that didn't care what you ran underneath it (Windows, Solaris, MacOS) they all run Java progams fine. Taken to it's extreme it means the OS is merely an interface between Java programs and hardware (since Java would be the method of software delivery users would choose the cheapest OS that enabled Java or the one that ran it best, SUN). MS obviously didn't want this to occur without a good fight so they purposely broke the Java standard with their own Java VM that added a bunch of features specific to Windows. This meant that there were effectivly two types of Java SUN's and MS's and software written for MS Java wouldn't work on SUN's JVM. Since MS could easily bring hundreds of millions of users to their JVM they won that battle. That's a big reason why they got into the last round of anti-trust hot water both here and in Europe. The browser wars would have been better termed the JAVA wars. It's also why SUN has been on a Quixotic quest to destroy MS's monopoly.
I think part of it is that they are a bit more aggressive about enforcing their worldview on customers (things like owning their own music company and selling only edited music) that bothers a healthy segment of the population. Also, ever since Sam died, they haven't tried very hard to put forward a good public face, they sort of take the driven view of the world (there is the stuff we "own" and the stuff we don't own yet). While the attitude is shared at most fortune 500 companies, the public display of that attitude is frowned upon outside of Wall Street circles.
Another difference is that Wal~Mart has historically operated in smaller towns in the country while KMart/Target/and others are moving down from the more densely populated parts of the country. The stores that the other discounters put out of business (Penny's, Sears, Monkey Wards etc) were all much bigger competitors who know how the game is played unlike the smaller mom & pops who scream bloody murder about Walmart and either figured out how to compete or were gone by the time Target came to their town.
More recently the company has come under a ton of fire from the Unions who would like to unionize the millions of employees Wal~Mart has and are very threatened at the unionized (grocery) retailers who cannot afford to pay union benefits to the number of employees they have and match Wal~Mart's prices. The union's haven't had much success at unionizing Wal~Mart so they are trying to make them look bad reducing competitive pressure on the unionized grocery stores.
Personally I prefer the convinence, selection, and short lines at my grocery to Wal~Mart, but go there or target for the hardlines stuff.
Thanks, I might just give that a run Windows was pretty pricy for a tiny OEM trying to sell sub $500 systems. I do think these are only avalible from WalMart.com (like the Lindows and Mandrake systems before) but it does seem like a great move by SUN to offer a nice computer to run OpenOffice. I'll have to give it a try.
The Java Desktop is a subscriber product did Wal~Mart get a discount due to expected volume or does the end user have to pay an annual maintenance fee for updates. IIRC it was $50-$100 per year depending on if you got it during the big sale (possibly still in progress). Having to pay that sort of maintenece costs would seem to push users toward Mandrake.
I'm actually curious because I had the same idea, but didn't investigate it far enough to see if SUN was willing to cut OEM customers a break. It would be nice to advertise a SUN operating system that everyone is hearing so much about rather than the scary (to small customers) Linux.
I don't know if even 1 was great the real world seemed to register more than it's share of complaints back in the day. I did enjoy one episode of Road Rules the spoiled rich kids were supposed to lead some cows to town. Anyway they got down to four or five kids on horseback and one yearling calf who eventually bolted and ran into a grove of maybe 20 trees. They of course couldn't get it out and rode on to town. The best part was by the time they rode into town the ranch hands had rounded up all the cows they lost and were waiting for them at the corral with the cows they were supposed to bring. Now that's funny. I catch a few shows at friends houses, but prefer DSL and wasting time online to wasting time watching TV. There is a show on Spike that takes odd Japanese game shows and redubs them it seems to be hit and miss, but when it hits it's pretty good.
So I got stuck with the musical instrument design as well. I built a guitar took forever (I'd guess 50-100 hrs with no wood finishing). The difficulty was that I never found good stable tuning assemblies I tried with screws but tuning was difficult with finger tightening assemblies you didn't have enough friction to hold them in place for more than a few minutes. It was an accoustic and I used several strands of thin wire (but only played one). The best instrument was a trombone made out of PVC pipe, it actually sounded pretty good. Our team stunk but road ralley and bridge building made up for it (1st and 2nd respecivly). Still have (and use the calc I won) good times.
I think Jeep implies that you might at least consider taking your 4wd vehicle off the road while SUV implies that it will be a kid/grocery hauler.
I thought bin Ladin was all about getting infidels out of Saudi Arabia. I can certainly see why this is a sticky situation what with the entire western economic system dependant on a ruling house that is tottering about and hated by its people. You are correct that other Islamic terrorists would like to see us end our support of Israel. I think the percieved degeneracy (is that a word?) in the western world is a big factor in their hatred of us, too.
To avoid confusion in the US we started calling liberalism libertarianism or classical liberalism. Liberal became associated with the 60s leftists and has been a dirty word to small government types on this side of the pond ever since. Anyone who likes the economist can't be all bad, those captions are the funniest thing I read.
Actually they are laws because it's cheaper to pass a law and have a few specialists enforce it than it is for each individual to protect themselves. Look at the Mafia, if you whack a mob boss will they go to the police and report a crime? No they protect themselves with a code of retribution. It works (how often do mob folks get hit?) but it's a huge burden (you have to arm your guards and spend a ton of effort ensuring that you have the backing to retaliate against anyone who messes with your business. It's much cheaper to say this is alwasy illegal and if you violate the law you will be punished by independant specialists. Both systems have their flaws, but seem to work most of the time. The legal system while slow and costly is a whole lot less costly (fewer layers of middlemen and time spent negotiating).
I highly doubt that the Israeli's will backstab us they are one of the few countries that can reliably be counted on to stick with us in good times and bad. I'd add the British to the list too. They are more of a mentor who can take the angry kid to the side and say you might want to think a bit before you act but if you act we've got your back. The Israelis and the US have been allies since Israel was founded and there are lot's of Jewish people in the US who are very likely to maintain the close ties.
When we dealt with the Afgan rebels we had a pretty good idea that this might well come back and bite us (especially once the stinger lanchers started moving through Pakistan to Iran) but the decsion was that it would be better for Islamists to be strong than the Soviet Union. We'll find out if that bet was right over the next several decades.
I think it's the mindset that draws someone to programming. It's a worldview that looks at the world trying to connect patterns rather than seeing specific instances. Most of the mindset does very well in the sciences because to that mind set all pythagorean theorum problems are applications of a consistant pattern rather than individual equations to be solved (which is how other mindsets view math and science). As a result they tend to think about things like standards and look for other cases in which standards apply. It's one of the reasons that they love to learn as once a pattern is learned all future problems are just an application of the pattern rather than new patterns to be learned.
The root cause of the S&L bankruptcies was S&L's making uneconomic loans to developers who were after the old limited partnership real estate tax deductions. Once the tax deductions were reomoved (years before) real estate prices crashed and the S&Ls that had only real estate loans followed suit. So the whole thing was caused by poor tax code and then changes to that poor tax code.
Not that regulation isn't neccessary just that the best method to regulate is to have it done by those with a financial interest in the outcome. In an ideal world the owners of Enron would have hired their own audit team to comb through management's financials looking for fudging. However since auditing has positive externalities that are difficult to enforce (if Vangard performs audits Fidelity could benefit from the results without paying their share of the costs) we toss the whole thing to governments who make rules that change the incentive set for managment and auditors (never to quite what the owners would have but closer) and hope for the best.
Ideally consumers would be in a position to negotiate with their financial institution regarding privacy disclosures, but since it is still too costly we use laws like GLB to reduce those costs of individually negotiatin what privacy disclosures are acceptible and what are not.
Standards are a very valuble thing for all invovled just look at the PC industry and internet (an older example is fasteners, nuts and bolts) as examples of how a standard can be very very useful. However it makes it very difficult to compete (since all the products meet the standard. Because of this value owning the rights to a standard is highly sought look at IBM, Visa, Microsoft, and Rambus' attempts just a few top of my head examples of companies or organizaitons that have profited from their control of a standard.
The balancing point lies in giving companies an incentive to work together for standards based solutions while preserving some rewards for developing a standard (and eventually passing it on to an open group). Imagine either of two senarios we still paid US Steel (or anther company) per SAE bolt wrench or socket produced or we had 50 slightly different patterns for fasteners. Neither solution is ideal the balance comes from giving the originator of a standard a decent return for their innovation with the tremendous gains from having an open standard.