Dan,
"If you had to pick a part of the economy [about which you] could say hey, this part is working well, you'd have to pick software and the way software prices have come down," Gates said...
A small point was overlooked here: HARDWARE. Consumer electronics in general is a far better example of an industry that is "working well". This very phenomenon is what brought computing to the masses and "economies of scale" to software developers. It doesn't take Stephen Hawking to figure out that making $100 off of 100 million users results in more earnings than $1000 off of 1 million users -- especially when competitors are discouraged from entering the market.
"It turns out that in capitalism, firms actually pick what products they do and what features to put in those products without the government helping them to decide how to do that"
Of course, it is nice to have Microsoft on the Government OATS contract and sell a few million copies of Windows to those pesky government agencies; they do have their uses in Bill's Brave New World. It really is best that all of our computer needs/desires are carefully regulated by the design teams of Redmond, so as to 'correctly' experience the full wonders of the information age as Microsoft intends it to be. In the most successful consumer-based economy in history, it would appear that the wants and tastes of the public matter little; hence the wondrous reception of such "well-researched" products as New Coke, The Edsel, and Microsoft BOB.
"Was there a software industry before we came along?"
Of course not, silly, everything today can be traced back to TinyBASIC and that famous bootstrap-loader for what must have been the FIRST tape-drive as well. There were some clowns doing assemblers and compilers for IBM, Apple, Intel, etc but nothing worth mentioning of course. Practically invented networking too...
"Did it make any sense that a company could independently write an operating system when we did it?"
What would you call UNIX, MacOS, RMX, OS/2 (IBM version of it),etc.? Or are we limiting ourselves to "single-thread" systems here. What makes Microsoft more independent than IBM, APPLE or ATT?
Can anyone list the OS functions which are absent from UNIX but which appear in a MSFT product? Let's face it, Windows is the bias-ply tire of Operating Systems; it'll get you from point A to B if you take it easy but watch out for those "bends in the road ahead".
"Now you could say, why don't I freeze the operating system..."
And practice a little iterative design work to produce a stable system perhaps? Problem is, other 'undesirables' (or if you have seen GATACA, 'invalids'), would commence to worshipping the false idol of competition and began writing custom software again. Back to the wild and untamed days of unchecked innovation. If a million users want something different it just might happen -- not good for someone's bottom-line.
Cheers,
Norm |
