Mike, I agree with your basic take (once one gets past your opening homily treating with equal respect Adam Smith's empirically derrived "free hand" simplification and Marx's secular religious hogwash about taking from the capable and energetic all they can produce and giving it out solely according to need).
The trouble with completely unregulated capitalism is that the goal of all capitalists (whether or not they realize it) is to become monopolists to the greatest extent possible.
The trouble with government regulation is that the correct resolution of complex issues is generally difficult to forsee; and even is forseen, it is generally most difficult for most politicians and bearuacrats to implement....since they are motivated by continued power/support/election, and aggrandizement of the power of their particular beauracracy.
Competition of relatively well matched entities with limited, rules based "rules of engagement" makes it all work best. As you say, the US Constitution and Bill of Rights were masterful and remarkably self aware efforts to create this result in the political sphere.
And our evolving system of government regulation of market capitalism...largely by setting the rules....is almost equally important, I agree. From the evolution of a federal government (but quasi independent) central bank, to antitrust law, to securities market regulation, to the currently evolving and remarkably complex issues of regulation/deregulation of the telecom industry.
One real world caveat. I think you are wrong about resenting having "no choice" except Windows. That evolved virtually completely through market choices of consumers and of the rest of the software industry, and very little due to Microsoft dirty tricks and flexing of financial muscle.
And in fact you still can use IBM's OS2. And you COULD use other stuff as well. Unix for PC's. Why don't you? Most importantly, because of compatible software. It is much more important to you to have skads of application software available, and new stuff coming out all the time, at the lowest prices, than some arguable advantage of another operating system (which at this stage largely don't exist anymore anyway.)
And how did the dominance of Windows come to pass. Well, I remember very well that when early Windows was slugging it out with IBM's OS2, it was by no means clear to the industry pundits who was gonna win. At that stage IBM was still the bigger Kahuna. Why did Msft win?
Basically, because Windows esp. Win 3.1 was a much more mass market product. Right product at the right time. IBM's operating system was initially wouldn't run at all well on most of the machines in existance as it came out, and required really massive upgrades to work well... and still was much slower than Windows.
Applications people accordingly saw the mass market and sales with Win 3.0 /3.1 and went that way FIRST. Which meant that much more reason to buy Win 3.1 rather than IBM's OS. Etc.
And meanwhile, Msft worked on producing and operating system that had all the 32bit, protected kernal, and other advantages of OS2, and more, but was more backwardly compatible with the growing legion of mass market Win 3.1 software. They called it NT. And in between, Msft created a bridge product that was almost completely backwardly compatible with 3.1, but required almost no more hardware horsepower to run than 3.1, but COULD take good advantage of more advanced 32bit code that NT loved. They called this bridge product Win95.
I.e., Microsoft gave the mass PC market what it wanted, with baby step upgrades, rather than massive dislocations of existing investments.
Smart. But more to the point, the reasons that Windows evolved as an enormously dominant, and ALMOST exclusive market position remain valid. There is much more utility for consumers, and for application software writers, in having a set of rapidly evolving but backwardly compatible platform standards, than in any advantages that a rival platform could supply.
This will only change if a rival platform offers truely revolutionary advantages. Networked PC's is what would currently appear most likely, but doesn't look very likely at the moment to me. But something will evolve. And Msft may or may not emerge on top when that happens. (Just as IBM might or might not have emerged on top (obviously it didn't, but isn't exactly a gonner either) when the mainframe to PC and then networked PC's revolution occurred.
The browers wars is in my view an entirely different animal. And here there is very little compelling utility to letting Msft tie its browser to its Win95 operating system in the marketplace, but using its dominance over PC makers to bludgen them into submission. (If Compaq doesn't get a Win 95 license, or is held up for months of negotiations in getting it, it will hurt Msft noticably but hardly severely. It would kill Compaq's profits and stock. It is a non-starter for Compaq.)
Msft's genuinely close integration of Internet Explorer into Win98 is a much more difficult issue. I have found myself trying to hit a back button when going between word processor files for example. Integration of desktop and internet control features is a natural.
Ideally, one would hope that Msft could be induced to provide to Netscape whatever "hooks" are required for them to integrate their own product into the operating system as well. But doing this in a way that would allow Netscape to really keep up probably would involve a really troubling amount of micromanagement that the court/gov't couldn't possibly get right. Either ineffective or stiffling or both.
So I don't have an answer and suspect that come Win98, Msft's gonna in effect get its way, perhaps after some fur flies.
See surfer Mike, you do have a rival in the long windedness category. <gg> At least I balance my laziness re: typos (wouldn't integrated browser spell checking be great) with an occasional paragraph, however. <g>
Doug |
