Re. MSFT & Compaq licensing terms.
The facts you bring to the table are excellent and enlightening, but in a way you are playing right into Mr. Bearded One's hands by focusing on the specific event. What should be addressed is Mr. Bearded One's more general premise: that it is "bad" or "immoral" for Microsoft to exercise its property rights, even if such an exercise would cause a 3rd party like Compaq to (theoretically) become unprofitable in the future.
In other words, Mr. Bearded One's implication is that Compaq's continued profitability is more "important" or "better" than the right of Microsoft to set and enforce the licensing terms for its intellectual property. He is, through a colorful mafia-esque (and backed by false facts, as you point out) depiction of the events, trying to instill a sense of outrage so that people don't actually bother to consider the logic and premise behind his case.
Because once you're clouded with rage and a notion that Microsoft "is threatening to put Compaq out of business", then it's quite logical to demand that the government step in and prevent such an atrocity. In one stroke he has brilliantly turned an attempt to subvert/defend Microsoft's licensing rights into an excuse for government to step in and remove such rights.
Oh, wait, I forgot. Property rights no longer apply to Microsoft at all, because they've made their product extremely desirable and successful and now have a very large share of the market (the word "monopoly" being the official substitute for the preceding terms, since it has a much more negative and emotional feel to it).
Very interesting: the more successful you are in the marketplace, the less rights you have in terms of owning, licensing, and extending your product. Moral of this tale: when you get to 50% market share, stop interviewing for new employees, place output limits on your factories, and institute new performance review systems whereby people get pay cuts if they make the product any more desirable.
--Carlos |
