Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 02:54:39 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> Cc: <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Feeding the Troll (Was: freebsd as a desktop ?) Message-ID: <000801c17be8$e79f7220$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <00c901c17b3a$8998b2d0$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>-----Original Message----- >From: Anthony Atkielski [mailto:anthony@freebie.atkielski.com] >Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2001 6:06 AM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: chat@freebsd.org >Subject: Re: Feeding the Troll (Was: freebsd as a desktop ?) > > >Ted writes: > >> I am not aware of any studies that anyone has >> done that make this claim. > >That is apparent. And neither are you aware of any or you would have cited them. Both of us are unaware of any reputable studies that come to this conclusion because they don't exist. > >> Care to cite some specific examples to support >> your point or are you just shooting from the hip? > >I already have. High-profile cases included AT&T, IBM, and Standard Oil. Terry cited those, you didn't. >However, less newsworthy antitrust actions are undertaken with much greater >frequency. One reason Intel tries to keep such a low profile, for >example, is >that it is a very tempting target indeed for such actions. How does Intel (or any company for that matter) keep a "low profile"? Your just grasping at straws here. Intel doesen't keep a "low profile" anymore than Microsoft does. The reason that they aren't innundated with antitrust actions that declare them a monopoly is because they aren't one, due to AMD. There is no other commercial software company that is to Microsoft what AMD is to Intel. >IBM used to issue >small printed guides to its field employees with specific >instructions on how to >avoid conduct that might be construed as antitrust for the same reason. > And is there something wrong with this? It's an action that Microsoft ought to copy. You display little understanding of the huge expense and time commitment required to mount an anti-trust challange lawsuit that has a ghost of a chance of succeeding. It's not done just because the CEO of a company runs around and claims his product is the only solution, it's only done when survey after survey after sales figures after multiple other indicators show this exists as a fact. Consider how easy it was to prove Standard Oil was a monopoly vs proving Microsoft is a monopoly. With Standard Oil there were physical things, like gas stations, distributors, etc. which existed and which you could count. With software how do you get acceptable figures of what is out there? It's much harder. There's no central database everyone uses to register software. Yet despite this the finding that Microsoft is a monopoly was demonstrated, accepted as fact, and survived appeal. > >Sun has been attempting, in the most ham-handed way imaginable, to >simultaneously have its Java language declared an open standard while still >retaining every conceivable right to its use. It seems to want a >public-domain >cash cow. Some people might construe this as an inappropriate attempt to >maintain a dominant market position. > If such a market position existed. Server-side Java and Client-side Java is by no means the dominant way of doing things on servers and browsers. Now I don't dispute that what Sun is doing is wrong, clearly it is. But it's not monopolistic because Java simply isn't as widespread as it's proponents would like you to believe. If some day in the future Java does become the dominant programming language, I'll accept this, but right now the C language holds that title. (at least for Windows, this is what Microsoft claims, see http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-2128454.html) And as far as Javascript goes, while this may be popular on the browser, the survey shows (http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.200111/apachemods.html) that PHP has outdistanced Java as the scripting language of choice on the webserver. >AOL deliberately modified its instant messaging client so that it would not >interoperate with MSN Mesenger, in order to prevent Microsoft from >tapping the >large AOL IM market. > Your confusing an entire market with a single company's unique product. Companies are permitted to create new and unique products, this isn't monopolistic. If the product is good enough then it's use grows. At some point during that growth the product enters a grey area where it becomes more than a companies new unique product, but somewhat less than a defined market. Eventually as other products appear that copy what it does, you do get a market. Whether a company with a new and unique product becomes a monopoly or not is due in a large part to whether they block other companies that later on create copies of this product that are independently engineered. (ie: no copyright violations) In this case why should AOL allow a competitor's Instant Messenger client to connect to it's IM servers? AOL funds those servers and they were never designated as public servers, the way a published anonymous FTP or webserver is. At the time of AOL's action, Instant Messaging didn't exist as a defined market. This is equivalent to complaining that HBO modified their TV channel distribution (ie: scrambled it) so it would not interoperate with a regular cable TV tuner, so that a regular Cable-ready TV set could tune in HBO. This is not monopolistic because AOL Instant Messenger wasn't a market, it was a service offered by AOL to AOL subscribers. Microsoft's IM is a copy of this, as is Yahoo Messaging and so on. What's going on with IM is that this is in the pre-market, embryonic stage. It's rapidly maturing as they are now working to create a public standard that all IM clients can support in addition to their proprietary one. Once that standard is codified if a single company locks all the others out then they would become a monopoly. Using the prior example, if HBO owned all movie channels on cable, then it could be considered a monopoly in that market. >There are _many_ other examples of suspicious behavior on the part >of many large >companies with market dominance; these are just two examples that came >immediately to mind. My personal opinion is that AOL is much more >of a threat >to consumers in this respect than is Microsoft at this time. I don't see that unless your talking about consumers of Internet access. >However, AOL has >very few competitors, and so there are few organizations to lobby >legislators to >push the DOJ to action. > AOL has lots of competitors, such as AT&T Worldnet, MSN, etc. And it is true that if they continue to concentrate on the dialup market and if by some miracle end up with 80-90% of the Internet Access dialup market, then they will have an anti-trust suit to deal with. However, I'll point out that AOL already has had dealings with the anti-trust regulators during the Time Warner merger, and those were worked out to the regulator's satisfaction. So I don't see as how AOL is unwilling to accept regulation the way Microsoft is/was. (Bill Gates has spoken against regulation of software before) >> There is something unique about Microsoft - they >> currently control something like 80% of desktop >> software for personal computers across the world. >> No other company has this distinction. > >Obviously, it is impossible for more than one company to have 80% >market share >at one time. But 80% market share is not unusual. Look at Intel. Look at >Apple (100% market share). > Intel does not have 80% of the processor market, it has 78%. See http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG20010713S0046 And further AMD claims that they will get 30% so Intel will slip to 70% if that happens. Apple is definitely the monopoly provider of Macintosh computers. But nobody classes Macintoshes as a special, separate, defined market. (regardless of what Apple probably wants you to believe) Mac's are considered personal computers and are part of the overall PC market, and Apple probably doesen't have 10% of that market, let alone 100%. > >> However once a company has achieved a monopoly >> then it can make the worst possible decisions >> and it will stay a monopoly, if the cost of entry >> into the market is extremely high. > >No company remains a monopoly by making poor decisions. Absolutely not true. For example, take the local electric company here, Portland General Electric. (now owned by Enron) They have made numerous bad decisions and are still the monopoly supplier of electricity here. I can remember several years ago them spending millions of dollars advertising the "all electric house" in short, pushing customers to dump their older oil furnaces and replace them with electric ones, as well as pushing people to get electric water heaters instead of gas. They even built a number of "all-electric" homes. Today with the power shortage they are giving away thousands of $6 coupons for compact flourscent lights in an attempt to get people to use _less_ electricity because it's so expensive to build generators. Meanwhile they have filed at least a dozen rate hikes over the last 2 decades. >Indeed, the >utility of >antitrust actions is often questionable, since they often do no more than >slightly accelerate the inevitable. Companies that are poorly >managed will lose >their positions of dominance of their own accord, whereas >well-managed companies >will tend to retain dominance no matter what draconian measures are >imposed upon >them to diminish it. > Once again you are ignoring the results of many anti-trust actions, and consider that the majority of antitrust actions are not lawsuits, they are requirements that regulators impose on companies that merge. In fact in the US, most large industries are very carefully regulated in this respect. If you look at the oil industry for example, the federal regulators have the country divided up into market regions, and no oil company is permitted to be a monopoly in any of them, this is why you have a Shell and a Texaco and a Mobile station on the corner all competing. If the oil companies had their druthers, they would have divided up the country into markets and each of them would be the monopoly provider in that market, and charge whatever they hell they felt like. >> This is the case in software. The cost of entry >> into the desktop software market, particularly the >> office desktop software market, is simply too high >> because users take years and years to make the switch. > >Fortunately, there are 100,000 other software markets to choose from. And in >most cases, there is a very dominant leading software package in >each of them. > But the other 99,999 "software markets" you are referring to are really not markets, they are in that "pre-market" embroynic stage. For example, take chemical corporation inventory and management, it's a specific industry and I understand that there's a single provider in it. But there is really no "market" of chemical corporation inventory and management systems, instead that software is nothing more than a very specific software product from one company. It it after all perfectly possible to run a chemical company with a general purpose management information system package. There's really only a few other markets in software that are separate from desktop software, one is server software quite obviously. Another is programming languages. >It's ironic that you try to make an example of Office, since that is >a product >that people buy voluntarily--it is not normally preinstalled on a machine. > People buy it voluntarily because it's the only option for most of them, because Microsoft pushed all the other office solutions providers out of the market. It's just now that we are seeing the first beginnings of competitive office suites (ie: Corel, StarOffice, etc.) but it will be many years before those are serious contenders on the desktop, and they will of course have to support the Microsoft Office file formats perfectly, (unlike the older competitors, ie: WordPerfect, Lotus, etc which refused to do this, and that became their demise as Microsoft used it as the key to topple them) > >> While this does starve the monopolistic software >> company of cash somewhat, users will not replace >> existing software with new software from a competitor >> unless there's compelling need, such as a must= >> have feature. > >It doesn't matter, since if they don't upgrade, even the >monopolistic software >company will go out of business. It's a lot worse than just being "somewhat >starved of cash"--it's bankruptcy. > This will only become a possibility if the TOTAL NUMBER of PC's stays the same or starts to shrink. Currenty, every year there's more PC's that exist in the world than there were the previous year. Those new systems need licenses and thus create revenue for the monopoly - not a lot but enough for it to survive on. > >> Because of this behavior it's going to take years >> and years to dislodge Microsoft no matter how >> piss-poor their software is. > >Try to think things through a little further. If nobody is buying >version after >version, Microsoft will be gone in pretty short order. The company >depends for >survival on the selling of frequent upgrades. No. The company does not depend on upgrade after upgrade for survival. New PC software sales, service contracts, training, and new product introduction provide enough revenue to keep them alive. And of course ultimately people DO upgrade because the hardware does wear out, and is replaced by newer hardware some of which isn't supported by the older software. The upgrade intervals greatly lengthen, true, but eventually they happen. What Microsoft DOES depend on the revenue from version after version for is to provide an immense amount of money to spend on fishing expeditions and extremely speculative operations. For example, it took millions and millions of dollars of operating system revenue to fund the development of web browsers and web servers that could be dumped on the market for free in order to put Netscape out of business. If Microsoft didn't have that cash cow of 2-year MS Office and Windows OS revenue burning a hole in their pocket then IIS and IE would have had to justify their existence by making a profit, thus Microsoft would have charged money or them, and we would not have a monopoly of webservers for the Windows OS. And the IIS webserver is obviously horribly designed and functions horribly because Apache is still beating it, and most Apache installs are on UNIX. In short, IIS is so horrible that even the Windows admins will switch OS to avoid using it. If Microsoft had been smart they would have dumped all that cash used to put Netscape out of business into improvements in the base operating system, then Windows would be far better than it is today and consumers would have benefited more. Instead Bill Gates got so stuck on the idea of beating Netscape into the dust that he sacrificed years of advancement on Microsoft's money-making products, and triggered an anti-trust trial that successfully destroyed the "Microsoft can do no wrong" image, will cost the company millons more, is the beginning of regulation for it, and has also spurred a dozen copy-cat trust actions overseas. >All PC software companies do. Not all, some of them depend on yearly service contract revenue for income. >Just having a large user base with Microsoft software installed is useless to >Microsoft, if they refuse to continually upgrade. > It's not useless, they can create numerous "must-have" subsidiary adjunct products that "snap in" to the base OS and are costly, or trigger upgrade activity. Windows Internet Sharing in Windows 98 was one of these products - it replaces a for-profit Microsoft product - Microsoft Proxy - with a free one just for the sake of kicking off upgrade sales to Windows 98 SE. And wait until the day comes when Microsoft announces they will no longer provide security patches to NT4 or WIn95 or whatever. There's always a way to force people to upgrade. > >> ... or cheating is an aberration and the antitrust >> lawsuit proves that Microsoft is run by criminals. > >Such strong emotions! How did your hatred of Microsoft develop? I've always >wondered how people come to adopt such extreme attitudes. > Huh? People convicted of a crime are criminals. Microsoft has been convicted of a crime. The people running it at the time were engaged in criminal activity. Thus they are criminals. If the shoe fits, wear it. > >Before it attained monopoly status, the illegal maneuvering to which >you allude >would not have been illegal (monopoly status is required for the >violations of >the Sherman Act of which Microsoft was found guilty). And after >attaining that >status, it would not have made much difference, as you observe. So >it doesn't >really matter. > I wasn't referring to the OEM bundling stuff. And anway, even if I was, Microsoft signed a consent document with either Justice of FTC about 5 years ago during the last go-around promising not to force OEM's to bundle Windows. When they kept doing it, they were illegally violating that contract. The only reason that Justice didn't bring that up as a charge is the double jeopardy clause. The penalties for trust violations are much more severe than simple contract violation so you ignore that violation and go after them on the trust violation. > >No, their continued existence is a consequence of making sound business >decisions. > Except for the decision to squash Netscape, which was so blatent that they couldn't be allowed to get away with it, thus the anti-trust trial. You can argue about it all you want but if Microsoft had bent over backwards to help Netscape and stayed out of the browser market, there would not have been enough public support for Justice to have a firm enough political base to file the antitrust case to begin with. And as they make no revenue from IE or IIS, it wouldn't have cost them anything. If Netscape was really as badly managed as you say, they would have gone out of business anyway. >In your crusade against the company, however, you've probably not >noticed that >the golden age of Microsoft came and went some years ago. While I expect >Microsoft to be a major market power for some years to come, I also >expect that >the very gradual decline now beginning will continue, I think your misreading what's happening with Microsoft. The golden age you refer to was simply the time that the company had an unbelievably obscenely large amount of money, now they just have a unbelievably large amount of money, and so are pulling their horns in a bit on the spending side. Also they have attained monopoly status thanks to the trial, so their biggest problem is how to get out of the majority of the market, yet still retain all the profitable/paying/good customers in the market, leaving the bottom-feeders for everyone else to eek out a living on. Witness Windows Product Activation (WPA) that features' sole purpose is to scrape off all the "customers" that don't pay for their software. Those "customers" can the move their taking ways to suck off other software companies and harm them instead, while in exchange Microsoft can point to a decrease in the total number of product installs and use it to claim that they aren't a monopoly anymore. > >Your intensely emotional reaction to Microsoft's perceived evil is rather >dramatically obvious in your posts. Intel is likely to be just as guilty as >Microsoft, but you do not rant against it. The same is true for >AOL, and Apple. > I tend to not rant against companies that aren't breaking the law. Despite your blathering to the contrary, the figures show that Intel, AOL, and Apple have nowhere near the penetration in their markets that Microsoft has in it's. >> The FTC action was not a statement that Intel >> is a monopoly but rather that Intel cannot withhold >> technical specs of it's products as a way of >> demanding customers license back patents to it. > >Now, why would Intel do that? What is the value to customers of that action? > Ask Compaq and the others that were listed as harmed companies to speculate. I have no idea why managers in Intel pulled that stunt, and apparently the CEO of Intel didn't either because he agreed almost immediately with the FTC which is why the case was wrapped up very quickly out of court. >> Bill Gates spent his time in the public eye talking >> about Windows. > >That was his biggest mistake. When you become well-known and popular, you >develop lots of enemies. > You mean like Ghandi and the Pope, right? Oh I forgot Santa Claus. :-) >> Thus his "time in the public eye" was nothing >> more than advertising. > >No, it was a serious mistake made by a confirmed geek who just >didn't understand >certain principles of public relations. Now he is suffering the >consequences. > He didn't misunderstand public relations. He knew that nobody pays attention to boring people and so he jazzed up the headlines with preposterous statements to get attention. Much like your doing in this thread. :-) This worked amazingly well, and if he had simply kept it at that level, he would have been dismissed as a harmless crank by the industry, and it would have been sufficient to keep the reporters enraptured enough to guarentee him regular soundbites to do more advertising. What he didn't understand is that to millions of Internet newbies, Netscape for a time represented The Internet. It was the physical manifestation of a virtual electronic happening that they had no other way of referencing. When Microsoft began releasing products that duplicated Netscape's product line, even the most clueless Internet newbie recognized that this was a direct attack on the darling child of the New Internet Economy. Even that would have been tolerable, until those products were released for free, well that's dumping and it crossed the line. Of course, by itself going after Netscape wasn't illegal - but it was unethical. In the US, people here don't like it when someone in a position of leadership does something legal, but unethical, and there's always punishment that happens by getting the leader on some side-issue. The scandal with ex-President Clinton is a pefect example. >> You can't be convicted unless your charged, >> and Microsoft wasn't charged with cheating >> to get where they were. > >Then your claim that they were convicted is baseless. > They wern't convicted of cheating to get where they were. They were convicted of the cheating that took place after they got where they were going. >> To argue that Microsoft was completely ethical >> throughout it's history, as you are doing, then >> once day decided to break the law and got caught, >> is extremely naieve. > >No large company is completely ethical, because it is impossible to >ensure the >ethical behavior of thousands of individual employees. True, however there's the "company environment" to consider, ie: whether illegality is institutionalized in the company or not. >But painting >Microsoft >or any other one company as a Great Satan is the acme of naïveté. > I don't - I say that the company is run by criminals, not that everyone in it is a criminal. In Microsoft's case, it's CEO rewards members of the company that break the law, if breaking the law furthers the goals of the company. This creates an environment that encourages unethical behavior, not discourages it. > > >So where is the harm to the consumer? A good browser that you must >pay for, or >a better browser for free. Looks like the consumer got a pretty good deal. > For the immediate short term. However product dumping is always followed by price gouging once the competitors have been bankrupted and the barriers for new competitors have been erected. Over the long haul, dumping that is not stopped will cost the consumers more. In Microsoft's case, ultimately they failed in the dumping attempt because they didn't expect that someone like AOL would buy up Netscape and keep Netscape fed and locked up in the kennel, ready to come storming out should Microsoft start in with the price gouging. While the barriers to the new competitors have been successfully raised (because so much crap has been put into the browsers now that it's a major production now to write one) the one serious competitor with the name recognition to take Microsoft should they start charging for the browser in the future has been given a fairly permanent cash artery that will keep it alive. However, Microsoft has been successful in clearing the field of webservers that run under Windows. While the Apache port is interesting from public-relations point of view, it's unlikely to take more than a fraction of the Windows-based webservers. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?000801c17be8$e79f7220$1401a8c0>