Jim Choate wrote:
Forwarded message:
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 1998 08:23:58 -0800 (PST) From: mark@unicorn.com Subject: Re: the best justice money can buy --Lessig
Of course there's a free-market remedy for Microsoft; eliminate copyright. If anyone can copy Microsoft software for free, it would be forced to compete on real benefits rather than installed base.
If there were no copyright nobody would have any reason to market software or much else for that matter. I would predict that much of the technology and infrastructure we have now wouldn't exist.
Thats pretty obvious. I'm usually the last person to defend Microsoft, but cancelling copyright is throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. There are a couple of obvious free market solutions. The first that comes to mind is to stop buying Microsoft product. This needs to be restated because even though obvious, it has a number of important follow-on conclusions. (1) There are other usable operating systems. (linux, mac-os, os/2) (2) There are other usable applications. (applix, macwrite?, whatever) Why won't people stop buying microsoft product? (1) FUD helped along by a microsoft reality-altering marketing budget (2) The *applications* they write are sometimes quite usable. (3) Their applications only work on *their* OS (mostly)? Why is that? (4) Their OS, even considering its questionable quality has, until this point, hornswaggled a bunch of developers because its the *defacto* desktop applications API. Why that is the case is probably a topic for endless speculation -- though it probably comes down to some version of the "stack 'em deep and sell 'em cheap" philosophy -- something that Apple still hasn't learned. (5) ...and most importantly of all...it hasn't become painfull enough yet to stop purchasing Microsoft software.
Free markets monopolize.
Hmmm. Thats a rather sweeping generalization. Perhaps it would be more enlightening to discuss the nature of monopolies. It is rarely possible to enforce a monopoly that isn't a natural monopoly. A company will tend to keep a lion's share of the market as long as continued investment in more efficient production gives them greater market share -- bringing you cheaper goods and larger quantities of them. At that point nobody cares because quality goods are being sold as low prices. When that breaks down all natural monopolies start to crumble or revert to their previous market share. Having said that, let me follow it with a big "all other things being equal". One of the reasons NT became popular is because they priced their NT server not "by the client" as Novell used to, but at a flat-price (if memory serves -- which it is doing more infrequently these days ;-) In doing so Novell's market share took a serious hit. To some extent I say good riddance. Novell server's IMOHO suck as a server architecture (not to mention truly horrible and snotty tech support). Novell didn't react quickly enough and lost tremendous market share. Are we suggesting that Novell be protected by the US Justice Department? I certainly hope not. You are welcome to go back to those days. The only other kinds of monopolies are cartels, and government enforced monopolies of both the public and private kind (the latter being the most heinous). Cartels always collapse because one of the partners will eventually see the increasing profits to be made by breaking the cartel. When this happens the company that breaks the cartel is the winner and the last one to leave the cartel may well collapse financially. If members of a Cartel get together and use guns to prevent the breakup of the cartel then that is a lot more like a government enforced private monopoly -- bad news. Government-enforced public monopolies like the US Post office and public education are wasteful, out of touch with their markets (because of the lack of competitive price feedback) and thus inefficient. They have no valid function in a free society and are a waste of taxpayer dollars. The USPS will tell you that everything is hunky-dory because they don't use taxpayer dollars. What they don't tell you is that the difference between the price you pay for their stamps and what you would in a free market is your tax. (this and the strange tendency of workers to "go postal" -- you rarely hear about FedEX employees going on an AK47 rampage, must be the water ;-) Goverment-enforced private monopolies teeter dangerously close to the pure definition of fascism. Fascism, from the latin "fascia" means "to bind together" (perhaps you remember the "fascia" tissue from high-school biology class during dissection of frogs, cats and other unlucky animals). In this case they bind a force monopoly with a yet-to-be-named monopoly. Classic examples of Fascism^h^h^h^h^h^h^h government enforced-private-monopolies in the US are the Federal Reserve System, the AMA, and the local Bar associations. Why is this? All these monopolies depend on FUD and govt to enforce their services. "What would happen if we didn't regulate xyz is that all hell would break loose and many people would lead lives of horrible desperation. 'There oughta be a law!' etc...blah blah..." You know the drill. Now that we have a perspective on monopolies, perhaps we can take a look a microsoft. Microsoft is not a force monopoly (usually), its not run by the government (thank god), it doesn't appear to be a cartel (usually) so unless further information comes in it looks like a natural monopoly. What does it take to undo a natural monoply? Build something cheaper, better and more reliable. Its just possible (and this might be a stretch, but only by a little) that Linux, Free Netscape Sources, Java etc might acheive this. Certainly Apache is more popular than any other webserver. How you come up with a new product in this type of market without M$ "re-inventing it" and giving it away is anyone's guess. (1) Hope that Linux/Scape/Java/KDE do something big (2) Write a Win95/NT compatible operating system that is faster and cheaper. If you can clone a Pentium, you can clone Windoze. (visions of a QNX like OS with Win32 API dance in my head). A GPL'd VSTa-based Win32 OS would be pretty amazing. This would be necessary because games are a big market and the Linux kernel just doesn't have what it takes to do realtime without a major hack. How about VSTa/a free DOS emulator/Wine. If Sun would fund this effort it could take a lot of wind out of M$ sails. Probably more than Java. McNeally would have to hop down from his high-horse. When will this happen? When the market gets tired of M$ practices and some lucky competitor comes to the fore. Until then there is no devine right to a percentage of the operating system market share. We can only code and hope. (donning flame retardant vest) jim burnes