On Sun, 19 Aug 2012 10:33:57 -0400, "J. Clarke" wrote:

In article ,
says...

Jack wrote:

Gov't making 50 cents on a gallon is between 40 and 66 cents. The oil
companies make far, far, far less at 6 - 8% profit/ and they do all
the work. The asshole socialists want to tack on a windfall profit
tax on companies making a small profit, while they are the ones
ripping off the public. Then, the dicks turn around and give 1/2 a
billion to Solyndra to **** away into the wind. Meanwhile, MS and
Apple are making 30-40% profits on their monopoly, and no one even
whispers windfall profit. Quite a joke.


That's because Microsoft and Apple are not exactly monopolies: they have
robust and effective competitors. Their competitors are themselves.

It's rather ridiculous to talk about "MS and Apple monopoly" given that
the two are arch-rivals and that Apple would prefer that no Apple
product ever run a single line of Microsoft code.

Not buying that. How about Word? What about dual booting Windows? That was
one of the selling points they bought by switching from IBM/PPC to Intel/X86.

Further, most of Apple's profits these days come from iphones and ipads
and ipods, all product niches in which Microsoft is pretty much a non-
starter.

Can't start. They can't get out of their own way. Such always happens with
"monopolies".

If they didn't improve their products with new features and the like,
their
revenue streams would wither.

So it is with most "monopolies." They've got to periodically provide a
better product at a lower price or they're out of business. The exceptions
to this rule are the monopolies established or controlled by some agency of
government (think cable TV).

There are product monopolies and service monopolies. A service monopoly
has a pretty much guaranteed continuous revenue stream--people aren't
going to stop talking on the phone or watching TV because the
infrastructure is old unless it gets so old that it stops working. On
the other hand, once every potential consumer of a product has the
product, the revenue model goes from first sales to replacement sales,
and to get those sales in any kind of volume you have to improve the
product enough that someone wants to replace it even though their old
product is still working.