Godamit.. i wasn't going to buy in to this.. but here goes:
Lots of fluff about free markets and survival of the fittest, but the
reality is that Microsoft supresses innovation not with quality but with
market power. The idea that a free market is somehow a concept from
Olympus is crap. In a truly free market, the godfather would use his Uzi
on Bill Gates and take over his $60billion. Not even I would suggest that
is a good idea. Truly free markets don't exist anywhere.
Our "system" includes an elected legislature that is entrusted with the
task of deciding what is good for us. Democracies, whether you like it or
not, have infrastructures for doing exactly what the U.S. DOJ is doing. If
they are wrong, so be it, but it is their job to balance concepts like
market freedom with perceived public good.
Talking about what is GOOD or RIGHT sounds nice in a moral treatise, but
we should all know from history that what was right yesterday is bad/wrong
today and vice versa.
According to some of the discussion going around (not only on this list),
Bill Gates did well, so he should be able to do what he likes. By that
line of reasoning, we should bring back Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Gengis
Khan. They got to the top by tramping on perfectly good people and ideas
too, and often used black letter law to achieve that end.
David.
On Sun, 30 Apr 2000, Jon Biddell wrote:
snip
>
> 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 ?
snip
>
> 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).
snip
>
> So enters the Orwellian "1984" scenario - where is the a company's
> freedom to innovate and expand ?
snip
>
> No, these partnerings are catering to the maximum market share to
> maximise their profit. Windows, and its' variants, have that market share.
>
snip
>
> 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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