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Non-Tech : Kirk's Market Thoughts
COHR 170.45-2.6%Dec 17 3:59 PM EST
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To: Sun Tzu who wrote (12232)10/26/2021 1:04:13 PM
From: Kirk ©  Read Replies (1) of 26784
 
I think it is the courts, the ability to levy fines and jail those who don't pay or ...
I disagree that the courts are the main service the government provides to the US companies. I think the primary service that the government provides is the military that cajols other countries into favoring American companies. The other service is the USD.

Bill Gates got rich because I could not copy his software, Word and Excel, onto floppy disks then sell them at the DeAnza College flea market in Cupertino (Apple's original HQ) for a tenth the price I had to pay to buy them at Fry's in Palo Alto.

In fact I recall clearly standing on a river boat on the Columbia River in the early 1990s discussing this with the boss of a guy I worked with in Colorado Springs. We were in Portland for an inhouse conference and networking with people we don't see every day. His employee, Martin G, and I had pretty much all the resources of HP to prototype things that we thought were useful.. We built an optical oscilloscope probe for $200 in singles manufacturing cost to help me and others in our division do our jobs better but we couldn't get HP to sell it because they had a $2,000 model in the pipeline that they'd invested heavily in.... hence why startups usually do so well when good engineers leave with good ideas....

Anyway, the point then was we had this HUGE manufacturing cost to build hardware but software anyone could replicate with a PC and a floppy disk. Bill Gates had the patent protection and the US government plus US jails protecting his software that made him a billionaire years later. I saw this and bought his stock back then... 11/23/93 at $2.43 and still hold a lot of those shares.
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