**OT** Ok, now I'm sucked in - I guess you are using those terms loosely to describe somebody who uses whatever ideas he can find which are not defended by patents and he uses his marketing power to defeat competitors [which to some is bullying].
First, a comment. Up until fairly recently it was almost impossible to reliably get IP protection for software. Patents for software were heavily frowned upon both by the US PTO and by the courts. Thus, Bill legally had free reign to 'steal' IP, and so he did. The small companies were just SOL through no fault of their own.
Something I've never understood about your rants inre Bill, is that you seem inherently distrustful of that other big monopoly - government - and yet somehow Bill is good. When does a monopoly become bad? What is the definition of a bad monopoly? For me it is when a monopoly uses their monopoly in one area to leverage into another in which they do not have the best product - as Bill did with Netscape and Compaq. If tommorrow Bill decided he wanted to extend his monopoly to PC disk drives, he could do it. He would just threaten all the PC manufacturers with withholding Windows unless they used his (presumably) shoddy drives. Is this wrong, or is this just good business? If it is wrong, what is the method of redress? The problem is that power is self-catalyzing to a large degree. Once you have a monopoly in any area it is trivial to take over any related area and then move into yet another area, and another, and another ... . This strikes me as neither 'fair' nor good for the economy (It doesn't take much digging to show that monopolies are inevitibly inefficient. You need only look at the cost of a PC to determine that while hardware prices have gone down while increasing complexity and function, the OS cost has not come down anywhere near as much even while it increases complexity less than the hardware (hence the current lack of need for high powered PCs)).
In all seriousness, I'd like to see what you think is an abuse of monopoly power, and what you think the proper redress is.
Clark |
