Do you really expect people to use an alternate OS or browser when half the XP problems you listed can be solved with a few minutes of effort and common sense, yet they don't do that?
The messanger service can be turned off with a few simple clicks. Most spyware and popups can be easily defeated with adaware or spybot. Most viruses can be reduced by common sense on what you open/click on and running an up to date virus scanner. Gator can be dealt with by not installing it.
I do helpdesk at a college, and it amazes me that people manage to install gator/aim/kazaa/blubster/ect with no problem, but require 15 minutes of walkthrough to install adaware or Norton's
As far as XP not being stable, I reboot my XP machine about 2 or 3 times a month, and usually only because I've installed new software. It doesn't crash because I'm smart about what I run and because I keep my protection (adaware and NAV) up to date.
"because it is an innovative approach to moving people in an innovative and efficient way."
Efficient, at least in economic terms, usually means that it is the best possible use of resources. Spending $14 million on a project that has so far yielded nothing hardly fits that definition, especially considering how many shuttle buses, gas, and driver's salaries could have been purchased with $14 million.
I noticed that the pie chart shows 5% other, and I can't help wonder what that is. Unix? BeOS? PalmOS? WinCE? Would be interesting to see a breakdown.
I did notice that they don't have WinME listed, but I'm wondering if they rolled that into 98 - which would explain it being high. I know it's not terribly popular among the slashdot crowd, but most consumer computers shipped with it for about a year.
As far as Win95/98 users not being connected to the net, could be, but it could also be that many of them started using the 'net when they got their machines and are still using whatever search engine they used 6 years ago before Google existed, such as Yahoo.
Or in their cars (many cars have MP3 capable CD players now, and virtually all OEM head units are MP3 capable
I would guess there are also a ton of people who simply download MP3'S and burn them to cd's as audio CD's. That's what I do, and I've been doing it for the last 5 years. Sure, CD's are bulky, but I can get them free after rebate any day of the week, and throw them out when I get tired of them - and they run in any cd player. I remeber back in '98 when I had to use WinAmp to convert them to WAV files before burning in EZ CD Creator 3, now Nero burns audio CD's straight from mp3's.
The funny thing is I actually own an iPod, but still use cd's in my car. I bought a Transpodder, but it was a pain and not very clear, and it's easier to hit skip on a car cd player than an iPod. And less likely to get stolen.
The idiots in HR sent me a big fat glossy book, personalized with my own numbers, about what great benefits the company has for it's employees. The only thing they missed in the personalization was the fact that I was fired. How sofisticated, the company really loves me.
That sounds sadly typical of the people who work in HR departments. A few years ago, my mom was laid off from an insurance company after they decided to close the office she worked at. Several days later, they called her at home to do an exit interview, and one of the questions they asked was "why did you leave this position?" - which made her start crying.
Come to think of it, this was just after Christmas - I was home at the time on Christmas break from college. The timing may have been more a fiscal calender that conincided with the calender year, but it still seemed kind of harsh.
Businesses will attempt to seize market domination and then use their political influence to maintain their monopolistic positions. This will never change, the only we can do is make sure that we have laws in place to protect against it.
In many cases, the same thing that you are looking at to rectify the situation is the very problem that's creating it - more laws. There is an econmic theory called "rent seeking" that businesses will get laws passed to maintain or increase profits. Less regulation frequently means that companies have to succeed by actually providing a good product at a good price rather than using some form of regulation against their competitors.
As far as maintaining monopolistic positions, sometimes those positions come into being throught government action in the first place. Think AT&T before deregulation, the airline and trucking industry before deregulation, your local cable company, water company, electric company, ect.
I work for a college, and we use Nextel Direct Connect extensivly to commuicate with our techs. Frequently, a piece of classroom technology will break during a class (projector, pc, ect) or a professor will have trouble using equiptment. If all our classrooms were unreachable, it would make it difficult for us to dispatch techs.
Ironically, one of our satelite campuses has it's own wireless SpectraLink wireless pbx phone system for communicating with techs and facility people.
More efficient: it ensures drivers are actually plowing, and not sleeping or drinking coffee or at a bar. Also can be used to locate plows and dispach the closest ones to trouble spots.
Save lives: see above, more/clearer roads faster = safer roads. If a snowplow driver is near an accident, tracking can alert dispatch to this. If a snowplow has an accident, dispatch can locate them easily (think OnStar)
I just switched from Sprint to Nextel. Changed phone numbers, as I had moved - hadn't changed the number with Sprint because that would have renewed my contract. I ran into some problems with my credit rating - I recently moved and my address didn't match up, and they were convinced I really didn't exist. My Nextel rep spend about 4 hours, no joke, on the phone with Nextel. I was lucky that he was so helpful (my employer has bought dozens of phones through him and he is friends with a guy who works here). He said that customer service has gotten much worse since the whole number portability thing started.
One very interesting thing about this
on
AOL's $299 PC
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I visited the website and noticed it looked oddly familiar. Did a whois on it, and it showed up as being registered to online computer merchant tigerdirect.com . It's interesting that TigerDirect isn't mentioned anywhere on the page, nor do they mention it on their main page.
Seems like it's almost more that Tigerdirect wants to sell more machines than AOL trying to get more users.
299pcdeal.com
Domain name: 299pcdeal.com
Registrant Contact:
tigerdirect.com
Domain Admin (lonny.paul@tigerdirect.com)
-
Fax: none
7795 W Flagler Street
Miami, FL 33144
USA
Administrative Contact:
tigerdirect.com
Domain Admin (lonny.paul@tigerdirect.com)
-
Fax: none
7795 W Flagler Street
Miami, FL 33144
USA
Technical Contact:
tigerdirect.com
Domain Admin (lonny.paul@tigerdirect.com)
-
Fax: none
7795 W Flagler Street
Miami, FL 33144
USA
Billing Contact:
tigerdirect.com
Domain Admin (lonny.paul@tigerdirect.com)
-
Fax: none
7795 W Flagler Street
Miami, FL 33144
USA
Ironport's website mentions transaction confirmations as one of the uses, and that is certainly legit... when I order stuff online, I like to get an email confirming it, telling me it's been shipped, ect.
There are legitimate advertising emails. I buy alot of electronics, so I regularly get emails from companies I've bought stuff from in the past, and I'm glad I have - they have alerted me to some good sales.
To me, there is a huge difference from me getting an email from Compgeeks, TigerDirect, eCost, or another company that I've bought stuff from (and could opt out of if I want to) and getting emails to BUY DISCOUNT VIAGRA, or MEET CHRISTIAN SINGLES, or the like. If IronPort is doing the former, then that's fine by me. If the companies are using their stuff to do the latter, then there is a problem
When the first generations came out, they were $399 for a 5 gig iPod. Now you can get a 10 gig for $299. Hmm, twice as much space, better design, and 50 bucks cheaper. That seems like a price drop to me.
There really isn't any reason for Apple to price it too low. First of all, most people see it as a luxury item. People pay a premium for the cache of owning the high end product in the catagory - like owning a Rolls Royce or Porche. Secondly, they seem to be making a decent profit as it is - why make less per unit if they don't have to? Thirdly, since all the parts are custom-designed, there aren't going to be huge cost savings from amortized costs - especially since they keep redesigning it.
I'm not sure if Apple had the battery replacement plan and AppleCare at the time of the call. However, if it is the case that they did NOT, it's easy to understand why they wouldn't recomend an unsupported 3rd party service to their customers... especially after the whole Nokia "exploding knockoff phone battery" incedents. Could you imagine the lawsuits if they recomended a 3rd party battery that exploded?
I suspect that there is a small group of techies who have bought iPods, and then gone on to buy their first Macs. I bought a Windows iPod and was very impressed by it, and my positive thoughts on it's design helped influence my decision to buy an Apple powerbook 12" a few months later - my first Mac. At least one of my coworkers also bought an iPod and a few months later bought a Mac. So I think the iPod might be introducing Mac design ingenutity to people who otherwise wouldn't have bought Macs.
The security guys where I work are fond of this story. We had someone steal a couple of college owned computers, and aparently resold one of them to a student halfway across the country. The computer had Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition configured to run as "managed" -ie it gets it's definitions of our servers instead of symantec's. Our network guys got suspicious when they noticed trafic on one of our NAV servers coming from several states away - turned out that the computer theif never changed the antivirus settings before selling it and it was trying to get virus definitions from us.
When I first saw that headline...
on
ISS Fender Bender
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I thought it said IIS fender bender. I was trying to figure out why the space station was running IIS, and figured this was another microsoft-bashing article.
they run a forum with something like 160k registered users. There are certainly legitimate business reasons why they would want to keep logs on people - for example, to block users who have multiple usernames, who spam the forums, who are abusive to other members, ect. They should be able to keep this information for business purposes if they choose - and not doing so could result in a much less pleasant/effective/popular website
As far as being obligated to remove material, according to the DMCA they ARE required to remove content that infringes once they are made aware of the infringing content. The debate, of course, is if prices for a sale are infringing content.
In case you haven't guessed, I read/post on FW pretty regularly.
Yes, fatwallet did remove the Best Buy and Target postings after getting takedown notices. But the point of countersuing isn't to get the sale notices up again for this year, but rather so that a legal precedent is established for the future. I'm sure next year people will post more info, and Best Buy will sue again... unless a court has decided that they don't have a legal basis for suing because pricing info isn't considered copyright material under the DCMA. The fact is that it has never been tested in court, and FatWallet thinks that they will prevail if it is.
The other thing is that Best Buy also supeoned FatWallet for the names of the people who posted the info. FatWallet didn't give that up because they said there were technical errors with the notices, but I'm sure in the future they want to make sure that people can continue to post in their forums without being sued.
What japanese plants are you talking about in Ohio that are unionized? Honda is the only one I know of that has plants in Ohio (at least 3, one motorcycle, one engine and one car). Considering that the UAW has an article about trying to unionize them on their website, they clearly are not unionized.
I'm guessing the Michigan plant you are thinking of is the Flat Rock Mazda/Ford plant. I googled and couldn't find any mentions of their quality record, though I don't ever remember hearing anyone talk about what great cars the Ford Probe was.
As far as how German and Japanese companies treat their workers in Japan and Germany, that has no bearing on how they teach their workers in their U.S. plants.
Well, first of all if you have an Inspiron, this isn't going to help you, since they are moving support only for the corporate (Latitude and Optiplex) lines.
I can kind of understand where they are coming from. I do tech support, and I can't tell you how many people call thinking they know exactly what their problem is, when it's obvious in 30 seconds that they have no idea they are talking about. So sometimes you have to take what users say with a grain of salt.
Domestic manufacturing is responsible for most of the brands you suggest are better because they are foreign. News flash: they are made in the US, in many cases by union workers.
Yes and no. It is true that many "foreign" cars are made in the US - Hondas in Ohio, Toyotas in Kentucky, Mercedes SUV's in Alabama, Mitsubishis and Subarus in Indiana, ect. But to my knowledge NONE of those plants are unionized. There is a reason most foreign car companies build plants in the south, where unions are weak and frequently are right-to-work states.
Many people would argue that the reason for the problems the US is having is the unionization of their workforce. Their labor contracts require car companies to pay them even when they are not working. The result is companies run the lines because it's cheaper than shutting down and paying union workers anyway, producing a glut of cars that wind up being sold to rental car companies and fleets at little profit - and then wind up on the "barely used" market killing off resale value.
I currently have a cell phone with a major provider whose name sounds a lot like "Squint." I've also moved a couple times in the last year and a half. The first time I moved, I changed my phone number... then moved again 3 months later. The problem is that the company requires you to start a new contract every time you change numbers, and I wanted to switch providers when my contract ran out. My choice was either change phone # and start a new contract, or keep my phone number with an out-of-state area code - which is what I ended up doing. If I cancelled, I would be subject to early termination fees of several hundred dollars, so that wasn't an option.
Wonder if they will ever introduce legislation that lets you change a phone number without starting a new contract? Probably not, since that kind of thing probably affects much fewer people.
I don't see what this has to do with monopolies. Number portability does decrease the switching costs of consumers, but it doesn't give any company more of an advantage or disadvantage, and it's not going to change the number of companies on the market because it's regulated by the FCC.
Many economists would argue that the only true monopolies are those granted by the government - gas companies, local phone companies, cable companies, ect.
The interesting thing is that one of the most innovative and profitable cell phone companies developed in spite of, not because of government regulation. I'm talking about NexTel. They wanted to start a cell phone company, but couldn't get a frequency, so they bought a bunch of shortwave radio licenses held by taxi companies, messanger services, ect. The FCC said they had to include the radio feature on their phones, so they introduced Direct Connect push to talk service, and it's made them a ton of money.
If you read the history of the original catalog retailers, like Montgomery Wards and Sears, you will find that they were hated when they first started expanding, because they were killing small town stores (that had no competition and could keep prices high). They would organize catalog burnings. Now of course, Sears is struggling and Ward is gone. Things change, especially in retailing.
There are a number of other retailers you could throw in the "once seen as powerful destuctive forces, now pretty much gone" - Woolworth, K-Mart, A&P. All were seen as destroying "mom and pop" stores, and all are pretty much destroyed, or at least not nearly as powerful as they used to be.
Even now, Target seems to be beating the heck out of Wal-Mart. I know tons of people who shop at Target, myself included, while I know no walmart regulars.
So I predict that eventually something will replace walmart, in the same way it replaced a ton of businesses that "nobody could compete with".
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really expect people to use an alternate OS or browser when half the XP problems you listed can be solved with a few minutes of effort and common sense, yet they don't do that?
The messanger service can be turned off with a few simple clicks. Most spyware and popups can be easily defeated with adaware or spybot. Most viruses can be reduced by common sense on what you open/click on and running an up to date virus scanner. Gator can be dealt with by not installing it.
I do helpdesk at a college, and it amazes me that people manage to install gator/aim/kazaa/blubster/ect with no problem, but require 15 minutes of walkthrough to install adaware or Norton's
As far as XP not being stable, I reboot my XP machine about 2 or 3 times a month, and usually only because I've installed new software. It doesn't crash because I'm smart about what I run and because I keep my protection (adaware and NAV) up to date.
"because it is an innovative approach to moving people in an innovative and efficient way."
Efficient, at least in economic terms, usually means that it is the best possible use of resources. Spending $14 million on a project that has so far yielded nothing hardly fits that definition, especially considering how many shuttle buses, gas, and driver's salaries could have been purchased with $14 million.
I noticed that the pie chart shows 5% other, and I can't help wonder what that is. Unix? BeOS? PalmOS? WinCE? Would be interesting to see a breakdown.
I did notice that they don't have WinME listed, but I'm wondering if they rolled that into 98 - which would explain it being high. I know it's not terribly popular among the slashdot crowd, but most consumer computers shipped with it for about a year.
As far as Win95/98 users not being connected to the net, could be, but it could also be that many of them started using the 'net when they got their machines and are still using whatever search engine they used 6 years ago before Google existed, such as Yahoo.
Or in their cars (many cars have MP3 capable CD players now, and virtually all OEM head units are MP3 capable
I would guess there are also a ton of people who simply download MP3'S and burn them to cd's as audio CD's. That's what I do, and I've been doing it for the last 5 years. Sure, CD's are bulky, but I can get them free after rebate any day of the week, and throw them out when I get tired of them - and they run in any cd player. I remeber back in '98 when I had to use WinAmp to convert them to WAV files before burning in EZ CD Creator 3, now Nero burns audio CD's straight from mp3's.
The funny thing is I actually own an iPod, but still use cd's in my car. I bought a Transpodder, but it was a pain and not very clear, and it's easier to hit skip on a car cd player than an iPod. And less likely to get stolen.
The idiots in HR sent me a big fat glossy book, personalized with my own numbers, about what great benefits the company has for it's employees. The only thing they missed in the personalization was the fact that I was fired. How sofisticated, the company really loves me.
That sounds sadly typical of the people who work in HR departments. A few years ago, my mom was laid off from an insurance company after they decided to close the office she worked at. Several days later, they called her at home to do an exit interview, and one of the questions they asked was "why did you leave this position?" - which made her start crying.
Come to think of it, this was just after Christmas - I was home at the time on Christmas break from college. The timing may have been more a fiscal calender that conincided with the calender year, but it still seemed kind of harsh.
Businesses will attempt to seize market domination and then use their political influence to maintain their monopolistic positions. This will never change, the only we can do is make sure that we have laws in place to protect against it.
In many cases, the same thing that you are looking at to rectify the situation is the very problem that's creating it - more laws. There is an econmic theory called "rent seeking" that businesses will get laws passed to maintain or increase profits. Less regulation frequently means that companies have to succeed by actually providing a good product at a good price rather than using some form of regulation against their competitors.
As far as maintaining monopolistic positions, sometimes those positions come into being throught government action in the first place. Think AT&T before deregulation, the airline and trucking industry before deregulation, your local cable company, water company, electric company, ect.
I work for a college, and we use Nextel Direct Connect extensivly to commuicate with our techs. Frequently, a piece of classroom technology will break during a class (projector, pc, ect) or a professor will have trouble using equiptment. If all our classrooms were unreachable, it would make it difficult for us to dispatch techs.
Ironically, one of our satelite campuses has it's own wireless SpectraLink wireless pbx phone system for communicating with techs and facility people.
More efficient: it ensures drivers are actually plowing, and not sleeping or drinking coffee or at a bar. Also can be used to locate plows and dispach the closest ones to trouble spots.
Save lives: see above, more/clearer roads faster = safer roads. If a snowplow driver is near an accident, tracking can alert dispatch to this. If a snowplow has an accident, dispatch can locate them easily (think OnStar)
I just switched from Sprint to Nextel. Changed phone numbers, as I had moved - hadn't changed the number with Sprint because that would have renewed my contract. I ran into some problems with my credit rating - I recently moved and my address didn't match up, and they were convinced I really didn't exist. My Nextel rep spend about 4 hours, no joke, on the phone with Nextel. I was lucky that he was so helpful (my employer has bought dozens of phones through him and he is friends with a guy who works here). He said that customer service has gotten much worse since the whole number portability thing started.
I visited the website and noticed it looked oddly familiar. Did a whois on it, and it showed up as being registered to online computer merchant tigerdirect.com . It's interesting that TigerDirect isn't mentioned anywhere on the page, nor do they mention it on their main page.
Seems like it's almost more that Tigerdirect wants to sell more machines than AOL trying to get more users.
299pcdeal.com
Domain name: 299pcdeal.com
Registrant Contact:
tigerdirect.com
Domain Admin (lonny.paul@tigerdirect.com)
-
Fax: none
7795 W Flagler Street
Miami, FL 33144
USA
Administrative Contact:
tigerdirect.com
Domain Admin (lonny.paul@tigerdirect.com)
-
Fax: none
7795 W Flagler Street
Miami, FL 33144
USA
Technical Contact:
tigerdirect.com
Domain Admin (lonny.paul@tigerdirect.com)
-
Fax: none
7795 W Flagler Street
Miami, FL 33144
USA
Billing Contact:
tigerdirect.com
Domain Admin (lonny.paul@tigerdirect.com)
-
Fax: none
7795 W Flagler Street
Miami, FL 33144
USA
Status: active
Name Servers:
ns1.domain19.net
ns2.domain19.net
Creation date: 11 Sep 2003 20:56:47
Expiration date: 11 Sep 2004 20:56:47
The fact that they are listing on the DDOS list for the MiMail.L Virus might have taken their servers offline.
Ironport's website mentions transaction confirmations as one of the uses, and that is certainly legit... when I order stuff online, I like to get an email confirming it, telling me it's been shipped, ect.
There are legitimate advertising emails. I buy alot of electronics, so I regularly get emails from companies I've bought stuff from in the past, and I'm glad I have - they have alerted me to some good sales.
To me, there is a huge difference from me getting an email from Compgeeks, TigerDirect, eCost, or another company that I've bought stuff from (and could opt out of if I want to) and getting emails to BUY DISCOUNT VIAGRA, or MEET CHRISTIAN SINGLES, or the like. If IronPort is doing the former, then that's fine by me. If the companies are using their stuff to do the latter, then there is a problem
When the first generations came out, they were $399 for a 5 gig iPod. Now you can get a 10 gig for $299. Hmm, twice as much space, better design, and 50 bucks cheaper. That seems like a price drop to me.
There really isn't any reason for Apple to price it too low. First of all, most people see it as a luxury item. People pay a premium for the cache of owning the high end product in the catagory - like owning a Rolls Royce or Porche. Secondly, they seem to be making a decent profit as it is - why make less per unit if they don't have to? Thirdly, since all the parts are custom-designed, there aren't going to be huge cost savings from amortized costs - especially since they keep redesigning it.
I'm not sure if Apple had the battery replacement plan and AppleCare at the time of the call. However, if it is the case that they did NOT, it's easy to understand why they wouldn't recomend an unsupported 3rd party service to their customers... especially after the whole Nokia "exploding knockoff phone battery" incedents. Could you imagine the lawsuits if they recomended a 3rd party battery that exploded?
I suspect that there is a small group of techies who have bought iPods, and then gone on to buy their first Macs. I bought a Windows iPod and was very impressed by it, and my positive thoughts on it's design helped influence my decision to buy an Apple powerbook 12" a few months later - my first Mac. At least one of my coworkers also bought an iPod and a few months later bought a Mac. So I think the iPod might be introducing Mac design ingenutity to people who otherwise wouldn't have bought Macs.
The security guys where I work are fond of this story. We had someone steal a couple of college owned computers, and aparently resold one of them to a student halfway across the country. The computer had Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition configured to run as "managed" -ie it gets it's definitions of our servers instead of symantec's. Our network guys got suspicious when they noticed trafic on one of our NAV servers coming from several states away - turned out that the computer theif never changed the antivirus settings before selling it and it was trying to get virus definitions from us.
I thought it said IIS fender bender. I was trying to figure out why the space station was running IIS, and figured this was another microsoft-bashing article.
they run a forum with something like 160k registered users. There are certainly legitimate business reasons why they would want to keep logs on people - for example, to block users who have multiple usernames, who spam the forums, who are abusive to other members, ect. They should be able to keep this information for business purposes if they choose - and not doing so could result in a much less pleasant/effective/popular website
As far as being obligated to remove material, according to the DMCA they ARE required to remove content that infringes once they are made aware of the infringing content. The debate, of course, is if prices for a sale are infringing content.
In case you haven't guessed, I read/post on FW pretty regularly.
Yes, fatwallet did remove the Best Buy and Target postings after getting takedown notices. But the point of countersuing isn't to get the sale notices up again for this year, but rather so that a legal precedent is established for the future. I'm sure next year people will post more info, and Best Buy will sue again... unless a court has decided that they don't have a legal basis for suing because pricing info isn't considered copyright material under the DCMA. The fact is that it has never been tested in court, and FatWallet thinks that they will prevail if it is.
The other thing is that Best Buy also supeoned FatWallet for the names of the people who posted the info. FatWallet didn't give that up because they said there were technical errors with the notices, but I'm sure in the future they want to make sure that people can continue to post in their forums without being sued.
What japanese plants are you talking about in Ohio that are unionized? Honda is the only one I know of that has plants in Ohio (at least 3, one motorcycle, one engine and one car). Considering that the UAW has an article about trying to unionize them on their website, they clearly are not unionized.
I'm guessing the Michigan plant you are thinking of is the Flat Rock Mazda/Ford plant. I googled and couldn't find any mentions of their quality record, though I don't ever remember hearing anyone talk about what great cars the Ford Probe was.
As far as how German and Japanese companies treat their workers in Japan and Germany, that has no bearing on how they teach their workers in their U.S. plants.
Well, first of all if you have an Inspiron, this isn't going to help you, since they are moving support only for the corporate (Latitude and Optiplex) lines.
I can kind of understand where they are coming from. I do tech support, and I can't tell you how many people call thinking they know exactly what their problem is, when it's obvious in 30 seconds that they have no idea they are talking about. So sometimes you have to take what users say with a grain of salt.
Domestic manufacturing is responsible for most of the brands you suggest are better because they are foreign. News flash: they are made in the US, in many cases by union workers.
Yes and no. It is true that many "foreign" cars are made in the US - Hondas in Ohio, Toyotas in Kentucky, Mercedes SUV's in Alabama, Mitsubishis and Subarus in Indiana, ect. But to my knowledge NONE of those plants are unionized. There is a reason most foreign car companies build plants in the south, where unions are weak and frequently are right-to-work states.
Many people would argue that the reason for the problems the US is having is the unionization of their workforce. Their labor contracts require car companies to pay them even when they are not working. The result is companies run the lines because it's cheaper than shutting down and paying union workers anyway, producing a glut of cars that wind up being sold to rental car companies and fleets at little profit - and then wind up on the "barely used" market killing off resale value.
I currently have a cell phone with a major provider whose name sounds a lot like "Squint." I've also moved a couple times in the last year and a half. The first time I moved, I changed my phone number... then moved again 3 months later. The problem is that the company requires you to start a new contract every time you change numbers, and I wanted to switch providers when my contract ran out. My choice was either change phone # and start a new contract, or keep my phone number with an out-of-state area code - which is what I ended up doing. If I cancelled, I would be subject to early termination fees of several hundred dollars, so that wasn't an option.
Wonder if they will ever introduce legislation that lets you change a phone number without starting a new contract? Probably not, since that kind of thing probably affects much fewer people.
I don't see what this has to do with monopolies. Number portability does decrease the switching costs of consumers, but it doesn't give any company more of an advantage or disadvantage, and it's not going to change the number of companies on the market because it's regulated by the FCC.
Many economists would argue that the only true monopolies are those granted by the government - gas companies, local phone companies, cable companies, ect.
The interesting thing is that one of the most innovative and profitable cell phone companies developed in spite of, not because of government regulation. I'm talking about NexTel. They wanted to start a cell phone company, but couldn't get a frequency, so they bought a bunch of shortwave radio licenses held by taxi companies, messanger services, ect. The FCC said they had to include the radio feature on their phones, so they introduced Direct Connect push to talk service, and it's made them a ton of money.
If you read the history of the original catalog retailers, like Montgomery Wards and Sears, you will find that they were hated when they first started expanding, because they were killing small town stores (that had no competition and could keep prices high). They would organize catalog burnings. Now of course, Sears is struggling and Ward is gone. Things change, especially in retailing.
There are a number of other retailers you could throw in the "once seen as powerful destuctive forces, now pretty much gone" - Woolworth, K-Mart, A&P. All were seen as destroying "mom and pop" stores, and all are pretty much destroyed, or at least not nearly as powerful as they used to be.
Even now, Target seems to be beating the heck out of Wal-Mart. I know tons of people who shop at Target, myself included, while I know no walmart regulars.
So I predict that eventually something will replace walmart, in the same way it replaced a ton of businesses that "nobody could compete with".