On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Uri Bruck wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > I think the newsforge article misses an important point. From the article:
> >
> > "
> > I have friends who work for Microsoft, and they are perfectly nice people.
> > But I'm sorry, this is over the line. A company that makes this kind of
> > threat in response to requests that it follow the basic rules of free
> > enterprise and competitive capitalism
> > "
> >
> > Microsoft *is* playing by the rules of competitive capitalism. That's how
> > it got to a big near-monopoly. The emergence of such monstrosities is an
> > inevitable consequence of a free market economy.
> >
>
> What? Can you honestly call the U.S. market, much less the global market,
> a Laissez-Faire Capitalism one? I don't.
When I read my own quoted text, the one you reply to, it seems to me a
very clear criticism of the people who pretend that it is, and then go on
to idolize it.
> The reason Microsoft became so big is because it used many techniques
> which its competitors did not. Most of which were and are legitimate.
> (refer to the Corel-Draw thread for a small example). In an LFC economy,
> other companies would have had the sense to do the same. Or they would
> have revolted against Microsoft and endors an alternative to Win3.11,
> MS-DOS, Win95, and the rest of Microsoft gaining-power trail.
This has nothing to do with an LFC economy. There was nothing in the
existing economy that prevented them form doing so.
"Laissez-Faire is the theory that if we all act like hawks we'll end up
like doves" - Idonotrememberus (cousin of anonymous)
>
> And here's a funny quote about the subject (I think it's from the FreeBSD
> fortunes):
>
> <<<
> There were in this country two very large monopolies. The larger of the
> two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double-digit
> inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent
> postcard. The second was responsible for such things as the transistor,
> the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo
> recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback,
> magnetic tape, magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave
> radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical
> digital computer, and the first communications satellite. Guess which one
> got to tell the other how to run the telephone business?
> >>>
There are legitimate arguments that claim that breaking up was the best
thing that happened to Bell, but that's besides any of the above points.
You cannot compare the communications market to the market in which MS
grew and thrived. MS grew in an environment that was not highly regulated,
partly because it was growing along with the market.
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