At 11:24 AM 4/30/00 +1000, Rachel Polanskis wrote:
>All I have to say on the topic is that any company that holds so much
>sway over the NASDAQ and by association the global economies of the
>rest of the world is too powerful beyond words and IMNSHO falls
>into the same category as the Mafia or the drug cartels of small
>South American countries.
So - you're saying that any company that is so successful at what it does
that it becomes a major (not necessarily GOOD, but MAJOR) force in its'
chosen market sector and, by virtue of this, makes an obscene amount of
money from it is, by this action, no better than a group of criminals ?
>Microsoft has to be stopped. There are sound social and economic
>reasons for this, beyond the technical ones we all know.
Please elucidate - I thought that companies were in business to make
money for their shareholders, and if that effort means that a competitor
"goes under", then that competitor maybe wasn't all that good in the
beginning and maybe deserved to fail. Note that, from the judgement,
Microsoft has done nothing ILLEGAL (let us distinguish ILLEGAL from
UNETHICAL or IMMORAL for the sake of argument).
>I don't think splitting MS up will make much difference in the
>long run. I think the company has to be actively monitored and
>controlled in what it can do - not so much technically but with
>respect to it's business acquistions and it's marketing philosophy.
So enters the Orwellian "1984" scenario - where is the a company's
freedom to innovate and expand ?
>The big problem with MS as one person already pointed out is how
>it acquires new technology and subsumes it and locks it up so that
>it will only work towards promoting the Windows Platform.
This is called "good business sense" - no-one forces a company to
sell its' product to Microsoft.
>This is called "network effect" and the bigger the company gets,
>the more technology it can acquire (lock out) and this is
>why MS is actually stifling innovation. Network Effects include
>the diminishment of access to copyrights and being forced into
>partnerships when developing new technologies and also being
>able to use certain APIs and so on as a day to day requirement.
>That's why a lot of hardware drivers and new software technology
>are impossible to acquire in
>the UNIX environment. These partnerings only allow for development
>in controlled environments based solely on the Windows Platform.
No, these partnerings are catering to the maximum market share to
maximise their profit. Windows, and its' variants, have that market share.
Were the tables turned and Linux was in that position, you'd get the same
argument. In fact, if Linux were the dominant OS (the size Windows is
now, are you really naive enough to think that the Open Source philosophy,
one of which I wholeheartedly approve and support, would exist at all ?
Someone, be it RedHat, Caldera, SuSE, or any one of the other Linux
distributors, would attempt to "lock up" Linux in such away that the
situation would be no different to the Windows scenario now.
>There is also the issue of what impact on the Global economy a
>breakup of MS will cause - I think the US Govt will have to handle this
>very carefully as there's a lot of black money tied up in MS that
>could disappear overnight if the breakup is mishandled.
Possibly true.... But...
We are talking about one company, MICROSOFT - if the global economy
fails because Microsoft is broken up, then someone has screwed up
somewhere...In fact, let the bloody thing fail - survival of the fittest, and
all that... Just like big business..
Jon
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