On 10/16/2011 1:45 PM, Jack wrote:
On 10/16/2011 1:38 PM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
Jack wrote:

I'm OK with the 10% Exxon-Mobil makes. I get edgy at 40% that Apple
makes, but that doesn't bother me too much because I don't think they
have a monopoly. I'm not OK with a 30% profit that a monopoly (90+% of
the DT market) makes, particularly when the product stinks.

A perfect example of why monopolies are bad business.

I don't have a problem with 40% if they can get it. We have the
option of saying "NO" and not using the product. After all, while it
is a nice product, we lived on earth for thousands of years without
any type of phone.

Most monopolies are temporary.

Perhaps, depending on your definition of temporary. Microsoft has been at it of a quarter century. Standard Oil, IBM, AT&T had to be broken up by the courts. The reason monopolies like MS are bad is by definition, competition is excluded via control of the market. When competition is stifled by a monopoly, progress stops, quality stagnates and people are forced to pay what the monopoly says they will pay. MS is a perfect example of this, providing crap at a 30% mark up to over 90% of the market.

Just when do you think this "temporary" control will end?




Now let us inspect Reality to demonstrate why this is complete nonsense.
At the beginning of the desktop/PC revolution, there were two significant
OS players: Apple and Radio Shack (there were something like a half dozen
TRS-DOS variants, the best of which was LDOS). Then IBM entered the market
and Microsoft came with them, for the first time producing an OS.

Now let's fast forward. There are dozens of OS variants. Besides MacOS
(a FreeBSD/MACH derivative) and Windows, there are a bunch of different
Linux distros, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeDOS, at least one Windows
clone OS (whose name I cannot recall). In the mobile device space,
Microsoft's presence is too small to matter with Apple IOS and Android
(another Linux derivative) splitting the market between them. Microsoft
has no presence to speak of in the realtime/embedded space. They
are not a force in supercomputer or high-availability clustering. They
do not have a place in the multi-petabyte database space.

But you think they're a "monopoly". You are seriously disconnected from
the current state of this business. It is a simple, demonstrable, and
completely rational observation that Microsoft dominates only the desktop,
and then only so long as they provide a good value. More and more people
are turning to portable devices like high function phones and tablets -
a space where Microsoft has almost NO presence. This, sir, is not a
monopoly. This is a market with more product, more players, and more
competition than has ever existed since the dawn of commercial
computing. The fact that Microsoft knows how to prosper and maintain
high margins in this environment is to their credit.

P.S. Microsoft isn't as bulletproof as you seem to think. Go look at their
stock performance over the last decade.

P.P.S. The only "predatory monopoly" that exists in our nation is the government
and that's because they get to use force to keep themselves in power.
Fortunately - for the most part - that use of force is narrowly bounded
by rule of law.