I wrote 'Nuke Redmond'

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Sun May 7 00:30:46 2000

This message makes good sense, but I do have a few embedded comments below.

Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: Wayne M. Smith <wmsmith_at_earthlink.net>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2000 9:43 PM
Subject: Re: I wrote 'Nuke Redmond'


> > MS has the market share it has by targeting
> competition and ruthless use of
> > its monopoly powers
>
> That is backwards. The law, and common sense, requires
> that you already have to have significant market share
> to have monopoly power. Monopoly power is the ability
> to control prices and exclude competition by virtue of
> monopoly power. To me, the question is, how did MS
> achieve that power in the first place. There is no
> doubt that once they had the power they abused it --
> that is what the DOJ's case is all about. But it seems
> to me that they must have done something "right" to get
> the power in the first place, such as Windows 3.1 or
> some such. When you don't have monopoly power,
> targeting competition is not only not illiegal, it's
> what the free market encourages because that's what
> USUALLY benefits consumers in the long run.
>
I have to agree with this. What happens in the computer world, however, is
that once a given OS becomes popular, it takes over the market, mainly
because people can't exchange information, or at least couldn't back when
this was happening, because the operating systems were not designed for
that. Therefore, if I wanted sales, shipping, bookkeeping, and production
to be automated in a common framework, they all had to have the same OS.
The fact that PC network cards didn't support TCP/IP until late in the game
meant that other network OS' had that share of the market until about the
time Win95 became available. It's no coincidence, by the way, that this
blessed event took place only a few months after the GOV decided to open the
WWW to commercial interests.

I'd really like a couple of examples of software companies with decent
products that were put out of business as a direct result of Microsoft's
adverse actions, with the exception, of course, of producing a vastly better
product.

If you simply look at what Apple did with their extremely (for all the wrong
reasons) popular Mac, you'll see that they did all the bad stuff now being
attributed to MS. When you're in business to make money, you go after your
competitors any way you can. Apple did that with their "big-brother"
commercials on TV. Their product, though "cute," was no more capable than
an equivalently equipped PC, and cost over three times as much. They
prevented everyone else from competing with them in the hardware and
software arenas, and ultimately the price and availability of Mac products
ran them out of the marketplace.
Received on Sun May 07 2000 - 00:30:46 BST