G'day Michael, For what it's worth, I agree with you (and thus just about everybody who's not in our parliaments) about competition. But you're closing quote-of-self has some implications, I think. Remember Castells putting down the SU's implosion to an inability to keep up in the 'information age'? By his reasoning (if memory serves), the SU managed to put off the inevitable precisely because of its large industrial base and the stability it afforded. But by the mid-eighties (a decade after the erstwhile military-industrial convergence technologies had been redirected to the 1st world civilian market-place), it had begun to creak most ominously. Today, the likes of Microsoft might be said to offer a buffer in this sense. The decisive question might be, can they survive stuff like the directions in which photonics seems to be taking us (liquid-state 'instant/mega-capacity' processing, if you like)? Have they the political economic power to stifle this one? Or control its diffusion? Or does it matter at all? Is the thing to let the temporary gales pass you by, and just make sure you corner the market on the stuff that actually give computers and networks their value: software and IP regimes? That way, the better others make the technology, the greater the cut of the content owners. Whilst others bend and crash before these destructive gales, you just sit there like Jabba the Hutt, growing more inertly fat all the while. On that account, the likes of IBM need to worry, but Microsoft certainly need not. They've got so much stability they'd be advised to play to their strengths and stay inert altogether. Just buy up ISPs and would-be competitors as they rear their pimpled little heads; give their software away to new users (like a smack dealer always gives away that first hit); and buy up every text and image that comes along. Let's face it - this is what they're doing already. in short: - A commodified net, - in concert with a Microsoft default setting on every computer, - a US-authored but globally binding IP regime, - and a State Department which seems to lack either (or both) the power or inclination to compromise this gargantuan monolith, constitutes: - a blue sky future for Microsoft (hence the Kudlow warcry: never mind those p/e's - borrow at 7% and buy 20% a year for life!), - a classic dependency configuration as far as the rest of the world is concerned, and - an accurate description of the world today. If any of this holds water, the thing to do is to look for likely inhibitors to this incipient leviathan (I doubt it'll be the domestic institutional setting, whose interests are contingent - and I don't think mainstream economics has anything to tell us about it - but the net might yet evince some technical shortcomings, or the rest of the world might yet have something to say about revising IP's currently catch-all nature - otherwise it's a matter of waiting for the implicit gross distortions to bite in the form of underconsumption and mebbe some desperate belligerence). Anyway, I guess I'm suggesting even an apparently stable (to the point of apparent omnipotence/omnipresence) monolith like this might constitute what some of us call a 'contradictory unity'. Yours Nostradamically, Rob. You'd written: > We should also take note that this same sort of inertia that Keynes, >Galbraith, and Schumpeter advocated can prove to be dangerous when >maintained >too long, as they themselves recognized. For example, after World War II, >many >large firms in the United States used a combination of market power and >protectionism to permit them to maintain their outdated plant and equipment, > >while Europe and Japan were deploying more modern technologies. This >strategy >allowed them to enjoy a greater degree of stability, at least in the short >run, >but it eventually left these same firms vulnerable to a competitive shock >from >imports during the 1970s and 1980s.
