Well, Peter, I never maintained that MSFT was not culpable in the way they conducted themselves once they were a monopoly. They have done irreperable harm to consumers and companies. They abused their power, and competed illegally. Netscape? Yes - abuse, no doubt. But again - that was all once they were a monopoly. I do not agree that they got to be a monopoly by using illegal means. Of course, I'm not maintaining that they were pure as driven snow back then (show me a company that has ever been that, in the history of business), just that BY AND LARGE, they got to become a monopoly by a combination of strategy, luck, and COMPETITORS' incompetence. The IBM OS/2 situation was not just the fault of MSFT - it was even more a case of IBM blowing it, again. I don't want to argue over how MSFT became a monopoly - that would "require a book", as you put it. I believe they become one *mostly* NOT thanks to dirty tricks (i.e. whatever petty abuses they engaged in, were not the primary factors in their rise to dominance).
Monoplies CAN arise naturally - they don't always, and not every industry has monopolies. But there is nothing necessarily injurious to consumers when a monopoly arises by fair competition.
The problem w/ MSFT is that they have abused their power, and broken the law, injured competitors and consumers. What to do now - that is the question. Opening up the OEM agreements would only be the first step, but much, much more is needed. I'm afraid that forbidding bundling is not realistic - I sort of buy into the MSFT argument that they must be allowed to evolve their OS. After all, the lines blur of what is a "native" OS and when does functionality become an application. What they should not be allowed to do, is destroy companies the way they did Netscape. How to prevent that, and still allow them to evolve their OS is a complex question, and I don't think we can write that particular book on this board. The only purpose of my original post was to register a protest against what I saw as a seeming opposition to the very idea of a monopoly, and the lack of acknowlegement of the culpability of many lesser competitors in their own demise or lack of succes.
Apple's problems were deeper than not opening up their hardware. And I think you overdo the argument that "there's not one company out there that can create a great app and not look over their shoulder for MSFT to come down and possibly crush them solely because of the market position MSFT enjoys!" - MSFT has neither the resources nor the time nor the programming troops to control/absorb/copy all the sofware that's out there. There is too much going on out there and the times when everything was revolving around Windows have long since passed. With open source, Linux the revived unix platforms etc. MSFT looks more like a dinosaur fighting for its life than some all-powerful death star. Relax - competition is alive and well, and eating MSFT's lunch. MSFT will never control the net, they are being destroyed in the hand-held market, and are failing in the server market too. They can continue to milk their legacy desktop customers (at least for some time) the way IBM does their mainframes, but that's not a path to dominance.
Morgan |
