<In a free market economy, it is amazing how similar the returns on invested capital are, whether the business be farming, home building, energy production, or electronics.
There is the occasional business which earns out-sized returns when compared to the rest of the economy, one example is pharmaceutical firms. You can be quite certain that they do not operate under free market conditions - this is proven by their return on capital.>
Elroy, to ascribe MSFT success to crime is silly, insulting, pathetic and denigrates a great achievement. It's just good old fashioned envy, one of the seven deadly sins.
At the time of the MSFT/IBM PC, Apple took out full page advertisements which I remember, welcoming IBM to the personal computer industry. I thought that was daft and that Apple was going to lose big.
IBM and MSFT were lucky that their technology was cloned and stolen and that created a vast market, swamping Apple and creating an opportunity for millions of people to develop software, hardware and so on.
A successful negotiation which hugely benefits one party is no crime. At the time, IBM could have declined and done their own thing. They didn't think such a trivial thing was important enough to bother with. A couple of years before that, I predicted that the computer industry would invert and instead of the hardware being top dog, software next most important and user time least important, the hardware would be cheap, the software expensive and the user's time most valuable.
Of course returns on investment tend towards the lowest common denominator, but everything is not the same and some opportunities are huge and profitable and return vast amounts, not necessarily being protected by government. Google for example is just some excellent ideas and software.
The socialist grey ooze theory is false. Not all people are the same, not all businesses are the same, not all opportunities are the same not all returns on investment are the same. On the contrary, there are never any two identical situations. No two investments are the same. No scientific experiment can have totally identical controlling processes, just near-enough. All transactions are transient monopolies, some more profitable than others, with competing choices available only at the cost of foregoing the immediate purchase opportunity.
Envy stinks,
Mqurice |
