Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Keith Hankin who wrote (18669)	4/21/1998 3:14:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

Oops, not that there's any particular point in arguing with Alan Buckley, but I see I missed an opportunity to recycle another bit from my favorite little piece from the weekend, infoworld.com . You're entitled to your opinion, but if you believe the increased involvement of lawyers and bureaucrats in the software industry is going to make it a better place to work then we're so far apart we should just leave it at that. Mr. Lewis more or less addresses this : Popular Idea No. 2: We should let the market, not the government, decide. The market has decided. It's given Microsoft a monopoly in the desktop OS market, and Justice is not trying to reverse that decision. Nothing in any Justice Department action tries to give an artificial advantage to alternative OSes. Antitrust laws kick in when significant competition does not exist in a market. IBM has given up on OS/2, Macintosh sales have collapsed, and most software developers publish solely on Windows. The notion that the operating system marketplace is competitive is a fantasy. Antitrust laws apply to this situation. Of course, there's another fantasy at work besides "government vs. competition in the marketplace", but Objectivists are sufficiently far apart from the rest of us that we should just leave it at that, too. Apologies to Justin, who seems to have a somewhat more common definition of "coercion" than normal there. Cheers, Dan.