

So Long, Bill Gates, and Thanks for the Monopoly - edw519
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2008/06/gates_monopoly

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pg
"But the upside was enormous because the monopoly created a stable environment
where entrepreneurs could develop new companies and new products around a
common platform."

This is false. Multiple platforms mean porting and compatibility problems, but
they evolve faster.

Right now developers are pulling their hair out trying to make things work on
incompatible browsers, but who would go back to the days when Explorer had 96%
market share?

The Windows monopoly didn't encourage hackers to create new companies and new
products. Quite the opposite. Little of the work that hackers did reached
ordinary people, because ordinary people used an OS hackers didn't use, and
didn't want to write programs for.

~~~
kirse
The Windows monopoly allowed entrepreneurs to develop software for the largest
unified computer user-base in the world.

If we agree that the ultimate success of a software development business (or
any for-profit business) is rooted in its ability to maximize net income, then
how can you explain that multiple platforms and user-base fragmentation are
beneficial to that ultimate goal? One massively unified market clearly has
more income potential than several fragmented markets that individually
require additional effort to enter.

Also -- "because ordinary people used an OS hackers didn't use, and didn't
want to write programs for."

If hackers were too stubborn to build for the O/S that clearly had (and still
has) market domination, then I would argue that they really were not
entrepreneurs when they chose to overlook an obvious business opportunity.

Edit: I hope this comment doesn't come off as abrasive, because it was not my
intention. Please respond if you think if I've made a mistake in my argument.

~~~
pg
_The Windows monopoly allowed entrepreneurs to develop software for the
largest unified computer user-base in the world._

I wouldn't deny it. What I'm saying is that a unified user base is not nearly
as important as rapidly evolving platforms.

 _If hackers were too stubborn to build for the O/S that clearly had (and
still has) market domination, then I would argue that they really were not
entrepreneurs_

You're right about that too, though again, wrong about the bigger picture.
Hackers aren't motivated mainly by money. When the only businesses you can
start are boring or evil, they don't start businesses. But when they do start
businesses, the fact that they're driven by curiosity and hope, rather than
the mere desire to make money, causes them to create the fastest growing
companies of all.

------
sdurkin
"Without that standard, the computer industry in the 1990s would have
resembled the web today: diverse, vibrant and flowering with abundant
innovation, but also frequently broken because of the inability of disparate
products to make the most basic connections with one another."

Wrong. Without Microsoft, the computer industry would have been forced to
tackle the issue of interoperability far earlier and more earnestly.

If it weren't for this illegal monopoly, computers today would have a vibrant
mix of operating systems and technology that would be able to share
information seamlessly.

~~~
allenbrunson
I'm of the opinion that operating systems form a natural monopoly. The average
computer user doesn't thrive on diversity. She wants to use whatever her
friends use, so they can help her when stuff breaks, they can all share
documents easily, etc.

I'm not crazy about the stranglehold Microsoft had on the industry for so
long. But I think if it hadn't been them, it would have been somebody else.

~~~
thwarted
An operating system monopoly is not necessarily the problem, it's when an
operating system monopoly is used to gain a monopoly on applications. In the
same way users don't care about diversity, they don't care about operating
systems. They care about applications. If Microsoft Office ran on other
operating systems AND OPERATED EXACTLY THE SAME WAY (which excludes
Microsoft's attempts to have Office and IE on the Mac), then the user could
still get help from friends when stuff breaks and share documents.

It may have been someone else, but perhaps that someone else would have been
about encourages standards and interoperability and not _application_ lock-in.

------
bayareaguy
_"If all that stuff worked right out of the box, we'd all be out of a job,"
said David Strom, an independent technology consultant and speaker in St.
Louis. Strom has a speech praising Gates for, among other things, effectively
guaranteeing full employment for IT people called in to make Microsoft
products work properly._

This sort of thinking is exactly why hackers I respect stay as far away from
Microsoft technologies as possible.

~~~
tfinniga
I love that the broken window fallacy is being applied to windows.

------
cawel
_"If all that stuff worked right out of the box, we'd all be out of a job,"
said David Strom_

I'm not sure if this argument is used to support monopolies (via fueling the
IT industry), but if it is, it's ludicrous. It's like saying that companies
insuring against vandalism should thank the vandals.

I do not see "fixing MS bugs"-companies as organic to the IT industry. Sure,
more people are employed, but it does not create innovation, it does not
contribute to the growth of the essence of the IT industry (different from the
GDP resulting from the IT industry).

 _All of these problems are traceable to a lack of widely supported
standards._

Pointing to a lack of standards to explain some of today's annoyances (MP3
compatibility, sync issues, etc.) is correct. However, linking the lack of
standards with a lack of monopoly in those areas is wrong. I see soft anti-
trust policies (in the case of DRM) or lack of motivation for creating
standards-making bodies as more interesting causes. Diversity is not
incompatible with the existence of common standards. Let's think of all web
apps out there, offering competing products, all using HTTP.

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m0nty
"it was the open architecture of the Microsoft-based PC that spurred massive
creativity"

IBM-based, shurely? I mean, it ran MS software, but if they'd been in the
hardware business they'd probably have done what Apple did, and produced a
closed platform. That's more-or-less what they did with their software, after
all.

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schtog
Standards are one thing, monopolies another.

I guess as the complexity of our systems grow it will be more and more
important to keep the technology minimalist and easy to change.

Hmm what was i gonna say. Think virtual machines for example. There could be
several different but still compile to bytecode so you could run all kinds of
languages on different VMs and different hardware by making layers.

Hmm I will try to get this clearer and post again. But I stand by the first
sentence.

------
ComputerGuru
You know what? I think I'm really going to miss that guy....

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MaysonL
I just hope that his leaving is more permanent than "You won't have Richard
Nixon to kick around anymore."

