David Schwartz wrote: >> >>But if *every* vendor has to make that same choice, there is no place for >>that other 5% to go to buy another operating system. So the other >>operating system(s) die off. And those 5% become customers of Microsoft >>since there's no other choice left. And *that* is where the legal >>problems start: they gained market share by preventing consumers from >>finding competing products. > > > Right, except that's utterly absurd. If every vendor takes their tiny > cut of the 95%, a huge cut of the 5% is starting to look *REALLY* good. >
Sure, that would be true if the market would be / would have been really global. In practice if you have a shop you have a limited 'region of influence'. Optimally you are the only shop in this region that sells the stuff, or perhaps there are a few shops that compete with you. Lets say in your region are two shops competing with you, and you must decide wether to sell product A (95%) or B (5%), but you may not sell both. Decision 1: Sell A, share the 95% of the local market with two -> about 32% of the local market for all of you, if all perform equally good Decision 2: Sell B -> you get the 5% of the market, the others 47% each This calculation is probably still a very bad approximation of the truth, but things are definitely not as easy as you state them. EP -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
