First fact: MS is not an economic monopoly. Economic monopolies are the sole provider of a good or service. This grants tremendous power. Simply having market dominance grants you much limited power. Just because a judge says their a monopoly doesn't mean that the thousands of economists who disagree are in error.
In the real world, making a better product and marketing it well will pay out. Let's look at some failures:
Netscape - they had a decent product that they charged for. Microsoft not only made a product, but gave it away with their O/S. Rather than competing with Microsoft by releasing a better browser to compete with the bundling, or seeking more investment, they sought litigation and their product suffered.
Firefox - while not an outright failure, their sluggishness to reach a large portion of the market is easily explained: nobody knows about them. Firefox doesn't advertise, and it shows.
Opera - Opera charges for their product, or puts a permament ad on your browser.
OS/2 - Microsoft had the brilliant idea of selling their O/S at discount to computer distributors. Did OS/2 try to bid down and sway these vendors on their side? No, they did not. This, coupled with anti-IBM idelogy at the time buried them.
Any other examples I'm missing?
Superior technology isn't good enough. It must be SIGNIFICANTLY better to require the switch (nobody buys new upgrades unless they are worth marginal benefit) and it must be MARKETED well. Show me a product that did these 2 things and failed and you'll have an argument.
Getting Kazaa and using an FTP client to get a web browser are entirely different. Kazaa is pitifully easy to setup. If a browser isn't included on their browser they SHOULD be pissed off. Let them start with IE and if a competetitor presents them with a better product.
"Tiny minority" was in relatively terms. There may be thousands of people working for competetitors, but millions of people will be hurt by this judgement. Microsofts fictitious monopoly isn't powerful at all. Why is Winamp so prevalent? Why do people use ZoneAlarm instead of the built-in feature? The reason is because they made a significantly better product and communicated this to their market.
Opera does both of these, except their product costs money. Very few peopel are willing to spend that kind of money on a browser.
Firefox on the other hand is free, but how much effort do they put into telling people about their browser? Zero. And the results show this. People get so caught up in scapegoating corporations they fail to analyze their own inadequacies as a business.
And therein lies the problem. Legislators are telling us what is or isn't a monopoly rather than hordes of economists telling otherwise. And who do you think understands market forces better?
And effective monopoly is a total misnomer. Market dominance doesn't grant anywhere near the power that a true monopoly does.
There is a disturbing trend of turning corporations into scapegoats. Admit it, you get a knee jerk reaction everytime you hear the words 'profit' and 'corporation'. These laws are absolutely counter productive and will cause widespread costs amoung consumers for concentrated benefits amoung competetitors. Bravo lawyers.
Oh that's right, no distros have made a platform that has anywhere NEAR the user-friendliness that MS does. If you don't like being locked on you are more than free to switch. That's the beauty of a free market, and one of the fundamental reasons why MS isn't a monopoly, unlike the US Postal Service.
Ahh wonderful! Let's set out on some witch-hunt against loosely defined judicial 'monopolies'. Sure unbundling these services may piss of Joe User who actually likes having a browser pre-installed, as well as a media player and a mail client, but hey, at least the competetitors are making a nice profit, right?
Please. Take an economics class. A monopoly is the single provider of a good or service. Why do you think they are getting crushed in the server market? Why do so many people use Winamp?
"Oh but Firefox and Opera are much better, why don't people use those! Monopoly I tells ya!"
Opera costs money. Firefox constantly has an identity crisis and more importantly doesn't make the effort tell anyone they exist. It's no mystery why it hasn't caught on, and you can bet it has nothing to do with fictitious monopolies.
Notice how the consumers never entered this equation at all? Isn't it feasible that Joe User LIKES having an operating system that doesn't require him to go hunting all over the internet for simple things like media players and Instant messaging? My God, if they took out the browser the average computer illiterate wouldn't know what to do. Use an FTP client to get one? This is just a government mandate to protect competetitors that can't compete for various number of reasons.
You can argue all you want that it's because they have a monopoly but you'd be conveniently ignoring facts. Why do people use Windows XP? It's not relatively stable, but its stable enough for the average user and more importantly: It's user friendly. No Linux distro can compete with that level ease, and Apple is too expensive.
If you take out these components you're not only just pissing off Microsoft (which may be a laudable goal) but the millions of users who LOVE having everything in one nice package. But hey, at least that tiny minority of competetitors will get make some nice profit, right?
Make a significantly better product and communicate this to your target market. Do this, and you'll win. It happened with A & P Grocers (80% of the market was theirs, and they eventually went bankrupt for not responding to market trends) and it can happen with Microsoft. Don't hide behind litigation
It would be more accurate to divide THOSE per capita numbers by the GDP per capita as well. Then we'd see what percent of their incomes is being used for weapons.
Everything has a benefit and a cost, and to look at it from only one side isn't wise. Life is about trade offs.
For example, thousands of people die on roadways every year. Think of all the lives that could be saved by banning automobiles. Of course this is ludicrous because the cost of roadways (thousands of dead people) is outweighed by the benefits (billions of people getting access to goods and services).
The same goes for FreeNet. The cost is kiddie porn, and the benefit is freedom expression where such things do not exist. Is this a good trade off?
I agree it should have been passed, but it had little to do with popular support.
The judiciary system is separate from the legislative one. Majority rule does not apply as it does in Congress. However I won't doubt that the public support didn't have any influence.
I agree 100%. Economically, a monopoly has no competetitors. But MS must battle competetitors all the time. I think what pisses most people off is that they don't make a better product to compete, but instead use conniving tactics.
Nevertheless we have seen even the most towering monoliths of the marketplace, like IBM. Scarcely anyone actually analyzes why people are using MS and NOT other products. We all know MS products are bad, so why does no one use the alternatives:
1. Too expensive (OS/X)
2. Unknown to them (Linux)
3. Not as user friendly (Mandrake vs. XP)
I don't think there's been an operating system that meets all this critereia. Notice it's not even important to make a GOOD product, just one that works. And XP, despite the security threats, worms and bugs, works for most people.
I'm still waiting for the Linux community to make something as ingenious as plug-and-play. It's a lot harder to make something user friendly that programmer friendly.
Microsoft may bundle the media player to gain control, but aren't they also satisfying customer demand? Wouldn't Joe User like to play mp3s and movies out-of-the-box? Isn't bundling more of a convenience in this case?
It may be 'uncompetetive', but surely if RealPlayer or Quicktime were SIGNIFICANTLY better alternatives, and advertised as such, people would voluntarily switch media players. Why do you think iTunes is doing so well?
If anything they should be forced include an uninstaller with WMP. And why should iTunes or RealPlayer be candidates for bundling? Is swapping one proprietary format for another accomplishing anything?
If you're saying that Linux can't compete because it doesn't have enough supported applications, then that is Linux's fault, not Microsoft's. If this is true then clearly people should be using Microsoft, not Linux.
However even I don't believe that. There are enough applications avaiable for Linux to persuade the modest desktop user or business user to switch. Office Suites, messaging programs, browsers, email programs, media players, graphics editors, and file sharing programs are all available for Linux. Nobody is locked into anything so long as alternatives to programs exist. As more basic users incorporate Linux, more companies will make new software for Linux. I mean really, other than games there isn't much that Linux doesn't have.
You OS/2 example is flawed. Marketing DID kill OS/2 by giving discounts to computer manufacturers to pre-load Windows. Why OS/2 didn't do this is beyond me. Combined with anti-IBM ideology at the time, OS/2 died. Also note that all the money and marketing swagger in the world did not save Microsoft TV venture.
Good marketing and a good product will kill Microsoft. Linux is definitely losing in the marketing section. As for the product section, they don't have any distros with the user friendliness of XP.
Market share does not equal monopoly and never has. Take a look at A&P grocers, what, never heard of them? At one point they had 15000 stores across the states and, like Microsoft, were accused of having a monopoly. However they declined because of poor decisions in their company, and now they are extinct.
Because really, MS only has market share in Desktops, Office Suites, and perhaps browsers. They are getting trounced in the database and server end of things. The reason is simple: No alternatives have been presented to these markets. Yes marketing is expensive, but word-of-mouth is dirt cheap, and very credible. However it is painfully slow. Until then I suggest the Mandrake crew really starts making a TRULY user friendly O/S. I had trouble even finding a decent step-by-step guide to downloading and installing Mandrake. These are failures of Linux, not Microsoft.
Excellent post. I've never been a fan of anti-competetive laws. They set a bad precedent and usually DECREASE competetion rather than promote it. MS will topple not from legislation, but from better software that is marketed well.
Don't upload RIAA music. They don't care how much independent stuff you have, just music under their copyright protection, which is largely garbage anyway.
If you uploaded 50-cent you deserve to be sued, not because of copyright infringement but simply for having bad taste.
If you're too lazy to google "jump the shark"
on
The Simpsons Movie
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Q. What is jumping the shark? A. It's a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on...it's all downhill. The aforementioned expression refers to the telltale sign of the demise of Happy Days, our favorite example, when Fonzie actually "jumped the shark." The rest is history. www.jumptheshark.com
I don't know how much marketing you've taken or studied but advertising is but a fraction of what goes on in marketing. Along with "corporation" and "profit", it has been a word the incites a knee-jerk reaction of resentment. Supply chain management, distribution chains and product development are all part of marketing.
I'm not saying Linux should or shouldn't advertise. I'm merely pointing out an alternative reason to its slow adoption.
I agree the bundling helped, but it was certainly not the end-all-do-all. If Netscape really was a better product, wouldn't people just ignore the bundled Internet Explorer and use Netscape? If people didn't know that Netscape was better, why didn't Netscape's marketing department advertise better?
Why are people switching to alternative browsers now? Unlike Netscape, the current browsers are astronomical better, both in speed, features and security. Netscape wasn't significantly better.
That said I've never though bundling is anyway monopolistic. The Windows empire is built off desktop users. Can you imagine Joe-User trying to figure out how to download a browser without a browser? What's he going to use, an ftp program? The argument was that MS should have been forced to put 2 browsers on their O/S. Firstly, if this was demanded from any other company it would have been denounced as lunacy. Secondly, this would only add to the confusion.
I am more optimistic about FireFox's future. You often here about people switching from IE to FireFox, but the reverse? NEVER. Current FireFox users will never use IE again unless FireFox becomes so atrociously bad they have no choice. But given FireFox's track record I doubt it will degrade to the level IE so glorious achieves.
"Hoping" won't get us anywhere. The formula for product adoption is simply A) making a good product and B) marketing it well. Open source has a great history of doing A well and doing B exceptionally poorly. WOrd of mouth is a slow and agonizing process in terms of a marketing strategy.
I almost jumped out of my seat when I saw a real-live commercial for Linux. But sadly it was marketed toward business. It was more of an 'awareness' ad. Anyone who knew nothing about Linux before the ad probably still knows nothing. For all they know Linux is a little boy with blond hair.
Despite all the claims of 'monopoly' scarcely anyone steps back and REALLY analyzes why open source hasn't taken hold. And the answer inevitably leads to little or no marketing. A good product that no one knows about won't be used.
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First fact: MS is not an economic monopoly. Economic monopolies are the sole provider of a good or service. This grants tremendous power. Simply having market dominance grants you much limited power. Just because a judge says their a monopoly doesn't mean that the thousands of economists who disagree are in error.
In the real world, making a better product and marketing it well will pay out. Let's look at some failures:
Netscape - they had a decent product that they charged for. Microsoft not only made a product, but gave it away with their O/S. Rather than competing with Microsoft by releasing a better browser to compete with the bundling, or seeking more investment, they sought litigation and their product suffered.
Firefox - while not an outright failure, their sluggishness to reach a large portion of the market is easily explained: nobody knows about them. Firefox doesn't advertise, and it shows.
Opera - Opera charges for their product, or puts a permament ad on your browser.
OS/2 - Microsoft had the brilliant idea of selling their O/S at discount to computer distributors. Did OS/2 try to bid down and sway these vendors on their side? No, they did not. This, coupled with anti-IBM idelogy at the time buried them.
Any other examples I'm missing?
Superior technology isn't good enough. It must be SIGNIFICANTLY better to require the switch (nobody buys new upgrades unless they are worth marginal benefit) and it must be MARKETED well. Show me a product that did these 2 things and failed and you'll have an argument.
Getting Kazaa and using an FTP client to get a web browser are entirely different. Kazaa is pitifully easy to setup. If a browser isn't included on their browser they SHOULD be pissed off. Let them start with IE and if a competetitor presents them with a better product.
"Tiny minority" was in relatively terms. There may be thousands of people working for competetitors, but millions of people will be hurt by this judgement. Microsofts fictitious monopoly isn't powerful at all. Why is Winamp so prevalent? Why do people use ZoneAlarm instead of the built-in feature? The reason is because they made a significantly better product and communicated this to their market.
Opera does both of these, except their product costs money. Very few peopel are willing to spend that kind of money on a browser.
Firefox on the other hand is free, but how much effort do they put into telling people about their browser? Zero. And the results show this. People get so caught up in scapegoating corporations they fail to analyze their own inadequacies as a business.
And therein lies the problem. Legislators are telling us what is or isn't a monopoly rather than hordes of economists telling otherwise. And who do you think understands market forces better?
And effective monopoly is a total misnomer. Market dominance doesn't grant anywhere near the power that a true monopoly does.
There is a disturbing trend of turning corporations into scapegoats. Admit it, you get a knee jerk reaction everytime you hear the words 'profit' and 'corporation'. These laws are absolutely counter productive and will cause widespread costs amoung consumers for concentrated benefits amoung competetitors. Bravo lawyers.
So use Linux.
Oh that's right, no distros have made a platform that has anywhere NEAR the user-friendliness that MS does. If you don't like being locked on you are more than free to switch. That's the beauty of a free market, and one of the fundamental reasons why MS isn't a monopoly, unlike the US Postal Service.
Ahh wonderful! Let's set out on some witch-hunt against loosely defined judicial 'monopolies'. Sure unbundling these services may piss of Joe User who actually likes having a browser pre-installed, as well as a media player and a mail client, but hey, at least the competetitors are making a nice profit, right?
Please. Take an economics class. A monopoly is the single provider of a good or service. Why do you think they are getting crushed in the server market? Why do so many people use Winamp?
"Oh but Firefox and Opera are much better, why don't people use those! Monopoly I tells ya!"
Opera costs money. Firefox constantly has an identity crisis and more importantly doesn't make the effort tell anyone they exist. It's no mystery why it hasn't caught on, and you can bet it has nothing to do with fictitious monopolies.
Notice how the consumers never entered this equation at all? Isn't it feasible that Joe User LIKES having an operating system that doesn't require him to go hunting all over the internet for simple things like media players and Instant messaging? My God, if they took out the browser the average computer illiterate wouldn't know what to do. Use an FTP client to get one? This is just a government mandate to protect competetitors that can't compete for various number of reasons.
You can argue all you want that it's because they have a monopoly but you'd be conveniently ignoring facts. Why do people use Windows XP? It's not relatively stable, but its stable enough for the average user and more importantly: It's user friendly. No Linux distro can compete with that level ease, and Apple is too expensive.
If you take out these components you're not only just pissing off Microsoft (which may be a laudable goal) but the millions of users who LOVE having everything in one nice package. But hey, at least that tiny minority of competetitors will get make some nice profit, right?
Make a significantly better product and communicate this to your target market. Do this, and you'll win. It happened with A & P Grocers (80% of the market was theirs, and they eventually went bankrupt for not responding to market trends) and it can happen with Microsoft. Don't hide behind litigation
Like doctors? Those fuckin' thieves!
It would be more accurate to divide THOSE per capita numbers by the GDP per capita as well. Then we'd see what percent of their incomes is being used for weapons.
Everything has a benefit and a cost, and to look at it from only one side isn't wise. Life is about trade offs.
For example, thousands of people die on roadways every year. Think of all the lives that could be saved by banning automobiles.
Of course this is ludicrous because the cost of roadways (thousands of dead people) is outweighed by the benefits (billions of people getting access to goods and services).
The same goes for FreeNet. The cost is kiddie porn, and the benefit is freedom expression where such things do not exist. Is this a good trade off?
I agree it should have been passed, but it had little to do with popular support. The judiciary system is separate from the legislative one. Majority rule does not apply as it does in Congress. However I won't doubt that the public support didn't have any influence.
I agree 100%. Economically, a monopoly has no competetitors. But MS must battle competetitors all the time. I think what pisses most people off is that they don't make a better product to compete, but instead use conniving tactics. Nevertheless we have seen even the most towering monoliths of the marketplace, like IBM. Scarcely anyone actually analyzes why people are using MS and NOT other products. We all know MS products are bad, so why does no one use the alternatives: 1. Too expensive (OS/X) 2. Unknown to them (Linux) 3. Not as user friendly (Mandrake vs. XP) I don't think there's been an operating system that meets all this critereia. Notice it's not even important to make a GOOD product, just one that works. And XP, despite the security threats, worms and bugs, works for most people. I'm still waiting for the Linux community to make something as ingenious as plug-and-play. It's a lot harder to make something user friendly that programmer friendly.
Microsoft may bundle the media player to gain control, but aren't they also satisfying customer demand? Wouldn't Joe User like to play mp3s and movies out-of-the-box? Isn't bundling more of a convenience in this case?
It may be 'uncompetetive', but surely if RealPlayer or Quicktime were SIGNIFICANTLY better alternatives, and advertised as such, people would voluntarily switch media players. Why do you think iTunes is doing so well?
If anything they should be forced include an uninstaller with WMP.
And why should iTunes or RealPlayer be candidates for bundling? Is swapping one proprietary format for another accomplishing anything?
If you're saying that Linux can't compete because it doesn't have enough supported applications, then that is Linux's fault, not Microsoft's. If this is true then clearly people should be using Microsoft, not Linux.
However even I don't believe that. There are enough applications avaiable for Linux to persuade the modest desktop user or business user to switch. Office Suites, messaging programs, browsers, email programs, media players, graphics editors, and file sharing programs are all available for Linux. Nobody is locked into anything so long as alternatives to programs exist.
As more basic users incorporate Linux, more companies will make new software for Linux. I mean really, other than games there isn't much that Linux doesn't have.
You OS/2 example is flawed. Marketing DID kill OS/2 by giving discounts to computer manufacturers to pre-load Windows. Why OS/2 didn't do this is beyond me. Combined with anti-IBM ideology at the time, OS/2 died.
Also note that all the money and marketing swagger in the world did not save Microsoft TV venture.
Good marketing and a good product will kill Microsoft. Linux is definitely losing in the marketing section. As for the product section, they don't have any distros with the user friendliness of XP.
Market share does not equal monopoly and never has. Take a look at A&P grocers, what, never heard of them? At one point they had 15000 stores across the states and, like Microsoft, were accused of having a monopoly. However they declined because of poor decisions in their company, and now they are extinct.
Because really, MS only has market share in Desktops, Office Suites, and perhaps browsers. They are getting trounced in the database and server end of things. The reason is simple: No alternatives have been presented to these markets. Yes marketing is expensive, but word-of-mouth is dirt cheap, and very credible. However it is painfully slow.
Until then I suggest the Mandrake crew really starts making a TRULY user friendly O/S. I had trouble even finding a decent step-by-step guide to downloading and installing Mandrake. These are failures of Linux, not Microsoft.
Excellent post. I've never been a fan of anti-competetive laws. They set a bad precedent and usually DECREASE competetion rather than promote it. MS will topple not from legislation, but from better software that is marketed well.
Don't upload RIAA music. They don't care how much independent stuff you have, just music under their copyright protection, which is largely garbage anyway.
If you uploaded 50-cent you deserve to be sued, not because of copyright infringement but simply for having bad taste.
Q. What is jumping the shark?
A. It's a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on...it's all downhill.
The aforementioned expression refers to the telltale sign of the demise of Happy Days, our favorite example, when Fonzie actually "jumped the shark." The rest is history.
www.jumptheshark.com
I don't know how much marketing you've taken or studied but advertising is but a fraction of what goes on in marketing. Along with "corporation" and "profit", it has been a word the incites a knee-jerk reaction of resentment. Supply chain management, distribution chains and product development are all part of marketing.
I'm not saying Linux should or shouldn't advertise. I'm merely pointing out an alternative reason to its slow adoption.
Just the fact that it costs 0$ is enough to make people try it
And who will make them aware of this fact?
As an XP user I've been wanting to give Mandrake a shot, but Mandrake.com seems more like a corporate portal then a Free-alternative site.
Does anyone have a link to a comprehensive guide to Mandrake? Like a Mandrake-for-Dummies style thing. This would indeed be my first crack at Linux.
I agree the bundling helped, but it was certainly not the end-all-do-all. If Netscape really was a better product, wouldn't people just ignore the bundled Internet Explorer and use Netscape? If people didn't know that Netscape was better, why didn't Netscape's marketing department advertise better?
Why are people switching to alternative browsers now? Unlike Netscape, the current browsers are astronomical better, both in speed, features and security. Netscape wasn't significantly better.
That said I've never though bundling is anyway monopolistic. The Windows empire is built off desktop users. Can you imagine Joe-User trying to figure out how to download a browser without a browser? What's he going to use, an ftp program? The argument was that MS should have been forced to put 2 browsers on their O/S. Firstly, if this was demanded from any other company it would have been denounced as lunacy. Secondly, this would only add to the confusion.
I am more optimistic about FireFox's future. You often here about people switching from IE to FireFox, but the reverse? NEVER. Current FireFox users will never use IE again unless FireFox becomes so atrociously bad they have no choice. But given FireFox's track record I doubt it will degrade to the level IE so glorious achieves.
"Hoping" won't get us anywhere. The formula for product adoption is simply A) making a good product and B) marketing it well. Open source has a great history of doing A well and doing B exceptionally poorly. WOrd of mouth is a slow and agonizing process in terms of a marketing strategy.
I can tell why you went the Anonymous Coward route...
But yes, user friendliness is also a problem. Even the most ardent Mandrake lovers acknowledges that XP is easier to use.
I almost jumped out of my seat when I saw a real-live commercial for Linux. But sadly it was marketed toward business. It was more of an 'awareness' ad. Anyone who knew nothing about Linux before the ad probably still knows nothing. For all they know Linux is a little boy with blond hair.
Despite all the claims of 'monopoly' scarcely anyone steps back and REALLY analyzes why open source hasn't taken hold. And the answer inevitably leads to little or no marketing. A good product that no one knows about won't be used.