On Wednesday, August 8, 2001, at 05:47 PM, georgemw@speakeasy.net wrote:
I'm not disputing that Microsoft had a monoply BTW. I think it's a perfectly reasonable position that Apple's competition is sufficiently meager to say that Microsoft has an effective monoply on personal computer operating systems. I'm just saying that refusing to consider it because it gets its cpus from a different vendor was completely fucked up reasoning on the part of the judge.
Anyone who doesn't wish to use Microsoft operating systems is perfectly free to use the Macintosh OS, as I do, or one of the many flavors or Linux, or one of the three flavors of BSD, or to buy a machine running Solaris, or AmigaDOS, or whatever. The fact that most of the sheeple pick Windows is not a criminal act by Microsoft.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Who can say what possible choices you might have in the future, and when those possibilities might be foreclosed? If AMD died off, Intel might not have quite as strong an incentive as they do now to keep coming up with improved chips, but they'd still have a strong incentive, because much of their sales come from people upgrading their systems from an old Intel CPU to a new one. (Or buying a whole new Intel CPU system to replace the old one). This is even truer in the software industry; square cut or pear shaped, programs never lose their shape, programs are a girls best friend I mean forever.
I happen to know a _lot_ about Intel, for historical reasons, and I can tell you that Intel is in a vastly stronger "monopoly position" than Microsoft is. Lots of reasons. I can write a short article explaining why if there's sufficient real interest. Do I argue that Intel should be sanctioned? Far from it. In fact, I argue that anyone who tries to interfere in Intel's ability to sell products has earned killing.
Oh, one other thing I just thought of. I'm not comfortable with the idea that trademarks are priviledges that can be revoked. It seems to me that a trademark essentially is a way of attaching a reputation for quality to a product, and that "revoking" the trademark and allowing any random bozo to use it is essentially defrauding the consumer.
Nonsense. --Tim May