Hi, > ... It would be > really interesting to see if any company had the mettle to reduce their > price by a couple of orders of magnitude to try to corner the market.
it happens quite often. A lot of software is free for non-professional use, or free through an open source licence. It's not necessarily done to corner the market. Often it's done just to try and take a piece away from the market leader. For example, Sun's StarOffice cost me less than £30- from Amazon; the open source version OpenOffice is free. For most purposes it's as good as the Microsoft Office suite, which costs several hundreds of £. In many ways it's better. The ones who won't reduce their prices are the ones who have already cornered the market. That's the whole point of a monopoly - you can charge whatever you want! Where they face serious competition, or when they're introducing something new that they want developers to take up, Microsoft also gives away some very useful software, such as the SQL Server database engine, Web Matrix and others. -- Cheers, Bob
