Today, jim t.p. ryan gleaned this insight:
> There is this pervasive thread here, indicated by the M$ thing that it
> is wrong to make as much money as you can from something.
This comment, in my opinion, deserves more detailed discussion:
1) The "M$ thing" is indicitave of the fact that Bill Gates and Microsoft
will do ANYTHING to make a dollar, including, but not limited to:
* forcing OEM vendors to sign exclusive agreements to sell their
systems with only Microsoft OSes and applications, for certain
types of applications (i.e. office) by leveraging their strangle-
hold on the desktop OS and office suite markets
* force-feeding software upgrades to customers by forcing the
afforementioned vendors to only ship updated versions of their
software, requiring everyone else to upgrade to stay compatible
* Pressuring competition to sell out technologies or entire companies
to them at ridiculously low prices, by threatening to crush them
competitively
* using any and all resources available and necessary to crush said
companies when they refuse to sell out at ridiculously low prices
* further leveraging their stranglehold by using proprietary data
formats which prevent you from choosing and/or switching to a
competing product in order to communicate with other parties in
business or in your personal life who also have succumbed to the
same pressures
2) It *IS* wrong to make as much money as you can from something, if it
hurts other people. The actions that Microsoft has historically taken
to accomplish its goals (such as those mentioned above) clearly hurt
businesses, consumers, and their competition.
One of the bases of our free-market system is that competition is good,
desireable, and important for a free market to thrive. Economists and
politicians, in rare form, have agreed on this point sufficiently that we
now have the Sherman Anti-trust Act et. al., which makes it illegal for
businesses to engage in practices that stifle competition, because it
hurts the market, and subsequently hurts the consumer. That is exactly
what Microsoft has done, as has been ruled in a court of law.
The consequenses of the first two bullets above are that you, the
consumer, have been forced to receive (and pay for, whether you realize it
or not) copies of software that you don't necessarily want, such as
Microsoft Office. Try buying an Intel-clone-based computer without it.
It's not as hard as it was say, 18 months ago, but it's still hard. But
as a result of having this software shipped with your system, you now no
longer have any reason to even look at say, Lotus SmartSuite. You've
already got an office suite, and it came for free on your system (or so
many people thought, not realizing that the price is factored in to what
you pay).
The consequences of the next two bullets are that any company who creates
an innovative product which touches a market segment, even peripherally,
where a Microsoft product lives, either gets bought or crushed. Often the
business which is bought is crushed anyway. People working at these
companies lose their jobs, the founders of the crushed companies go
bankrupt, and generally the employees of such a company often go through
other difficulties as a result, such as broken families, lost homes, what
have you. Some *DO* make out well, when Microsoft decides they want the
company bad enough, and are willing to pay well for it. But that's a crap
shoot. The knowledge of all of this creates artificial barriers to enter
into the market, innovation is hindered, and the consumer ultimately pays
the price.
The consequenses of the last bullet is obvious to anyone who works in a
profession (i.e. an office worker, as opposed to a laborer, such as a
construction worker). The monopolistic prevalence of Microsoft's
proprietary formats significant barriers to freely chosing NOT to use
Microsoft software, either because a competing product does not exist (in
the case where they bought out or crushed the competition) or because you
need to use what everyone else uses.
The bottom line is Microsoft makes all the bucks they can, and virtually
EVERYONE else loses, whether they realize it or not (with the exception of
a small handful of very fortunate newly made millionaires who had
something Microsoft wanted for itself to further its monopoly chokehold on
the software industry) . That's why we use the "M$" when we refer to
Microsoft, and that's why we hate them.
So every time you plunk your $200 bucks down for the latest version of
Microsoft's crappy operating system/office package/whatever, keep in mind
that you are chosing to support all of that.
There's greed, avarice, and then there's Micro$oft.
--
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Derek D. Martin | Unix/Linux Geek
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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