Re: <YOU'RE THE NEXT TARGET, INTEL>
Francis,
Is that post from the Drudge Report? However, there is no denying Intel has effective monopoly control over PC CPUs. Intel can change the standard at any time and others (CPU, chipset, peripheral makers) must follow their lead or risk bankruptcy. Acknowledging that whatever Intel does will set the industry standard, I would like to see what happened with IBM when they were the mainframe world's Intel and Microsoft, with 80-90% of the System/370 market, during the 70's and 80's. The European Economic Community and IBM came to the agreement that whenever, IBM was to come out with a new feature, they must make available to competitors, some months before, both the hardware and software interface specification. Nor could IBM claim that they were the only allowed to use this interface. This allowed competitors to develop peripherals for the new interface (todays's version would be the PCI bus or GTL+ electrical interface). This also allowed competitors to get a look at new instructions, since the programming spec must also be published. Therefore mainframe clone makers (Hitachi, Fugitsu, Amdahl) could attempt to include those new features (e.g. today's Katmai New Instructions, or yesterday's MMX) in there processors.
So, IBM always came out with there new feature first, but allowed competitors, if they were able, to offer compatible products a few months or a year behind IBM. Therefore IBM could extract monopolistic profits, for their innovation; for some months or more, until competing products were offered. This reduced IBM's leverage to dictate to customers and gave the customers, if they decided IBM was acting against their better interest, an alternative to IBM.
Hopefully, if there will be anti-monopoly action against Intel, Justice will realize there is a already a precedent for action and a guideline for settlement. |
