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Strategies & Market Trends : Piffer OT - And Other Assorted Nuts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alan Smithee who wrote (42433)	6/28/2000 12:32:00 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Respond to of 63513

do you have a comment about the Fortune article I linked? I just now had a chance to read it over quickly. I think the shoe analogy is flawed for a number of reasons, most of them variations on the theme about barriers to entry. I have written before that the real problem with the MSFT monopol(ies) has not been cost but lack of reliability and (perhaps to a lesser degree) innovation due to the suppression of competition. Lack of reliability is easy to demonstrate; as a lawyer, I am sure you realize that "proving" lack of innovation is far more difficult. Who is to say what would have been invented had the playing field been different? Who is to say what will be invented with a different playing field in the future? And who is to say whether those new things would have been invented by MSFT anyway? I also think the remedy must take into account the economic realities of the venture capital marketplace. The real restraint on innovation is that entrepreneurs with business plans directed at challenging the MSFT monopoly could not get funded before, because the VC's quite logically concluded that anyone who tried to take on Redmond would get squashed like a bug. The only ones who tried were a renegade group of volunteers (not usually the stuff of which a robust competitor is made) and SUNW, which funded its efforts alone and did not really throw the entire weight of the company behind them. SUNW also has stayed away from the consumer markets that MSFT dominates, for all the rhetoric about taking on MSFT. Oh, I suppose IBM tried to compete with both heads of the MSFT monster, but IBM can be so pathetic I don't even count them. No one can ever say how history would have been had it not evolved in the way it had. Parallels can be drawn and challenged in almost infinite permutations. If there had been no Hitler, would the A-bomb have been developed so quickly? If there had been no A-bomb, would we have had a third world war? A fourth? The point is, Hitler was bad, many think that the A-bomb was bad, and yet, one can argue that without them we would not have so quickly reached a stage of history in which world wars may not ever occur again. I am not trying to suggest that MSFT is Hitler. What I am trying to say is that no one can say whether MSFT's business practices truly prevented any particular development, or whether MSFT's breakup will result in a worse environment for consumers. Many thought that the A-bomb, which evolved in response to a horrible threat, was itself a horrible threat, and yet it has arguably resulted in a safer world. I can speculate that MSFT's breakup will unleash a flood of venture capital into companies which might create a truly interoperable climate for all varieties of consumer software. That software, made better by the threat of extinction imposed by competition, might be fast, reliable, laden with features now unavailable, and cheaper than today's versions. When AT&T was broken up, there were voices howling throughout the wilderness that our phone service would be no better, no cheaper, and we would want the old reliable AT&T days to return. Instead, less than two decades later, we live in a world where long distance is so cheap and reliable that many of us no longer even read our long distance bills. It is cheaper for me to call Los Angeles than it is for me to call my sister using the local phone monopoly (She lives 25 miles away). So I, for one, await the MSFT breakup with excited anticipation, not fear.