No, Seriously :-) MSFT had enormous financial and monopoly clout, few scruples, and no oversight. All that will change, in this scenario.
I know this does not respond to your question, but I think they agree with you. I think that, deep down (or, for that matter, not so deep down), they agree that they cannot survive in an environment where their core products are sold into truly competitive markets.
Silly me, I had more confidence in the ability of their people than that. Lots of companies are able to differentiate themselves on the basis of brand, product features and the like and do just fine in competitive markets. For example, Coke does not need a monopoly on the soda can market to leverage off of in order to sell sugar water.
Dangerous. And unproductive for everyone else, as they still have that monopoly, and can hold up everyone else's progress again while they try to repeat 1993-1996. I agree about the other companies. But the OS is the central monopoly position. Unless you have the proviso that their market share had fallen in the OS had fallen below x percent. Hard to figure, though.
I think you are forgetting that all the offspring companies would have the right to use Microsoft's OS technology. The threatened and actual competition from the other members of the group should keep prices efficient, even in the OS market.
Both are necessary but even together insufficient. You need a cohesive nurturing culture, technology, altruism, educational system, some egalitarian features...
It's hard to disagree in the abstract, or even in the concrete, if you mention the right examples. Still, there are strong theoretical reasons to be skeptical of government intervention in the economy. As our friends in the former Soviet Union have proven, the modern economy is simply too complex to be susceptible to government planning. In this country, such winners as the synfuels project and gasoline rationing in the Carter days are a good indicator of how government planning works out in practice for us. I say that any government intervention in an economy that basically works should be minimized. Microsoft's case is no exception to that principle.
Plus, the government takes 50 percent plus of our income in the form of taxes to do what, I don't know, and is constantly coming up with new regulations to force us to do, against our will, things that happen to benefit the constituencies that have the strongest lobbying presence, and have made the largest political contributions, in Washington. Some think that's fairness and justice. I call it something else.
Aside from that, the government practically invented the computer business from whole cloth.
The government took taxpayer money and used it to pay researchers to invent a lot of things, the rights to which it presumably gave up for rational reasons. That does not give it Carte Blanche to regulate the property rights of those who now own those rights.
Furthermore, we have no idea what inventions might have resulted had government not diverted 50 percent plus of the national income to its purposes, ostensibly under the rubric of "fighting the Cold War." |
