Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 22:27:21 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: davids@webmaster.com (David Schwartz) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Judge: "Gates Was Main Culprit" Message-ID: <199911222227.PAA02095@usr01.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <000801bf3531$d1e41a80$021d85d1@youwant.to> from "David Schwartz" at Nov 22, 99 01:37:48 pm
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> >o Thomas Edison, for a long time, locked out Alternating > > Current, the invention of Nikola Tesla, on the basis of > > untrue accusations. Edison went so far as to invent the > > electric chair to "prove" the dangers of AC. > > I don't know enough about this particular claim to comment. If > you'd like, I'd be happy to do some research on it. I think a > significant factor here is going to be that, for that time, > the advantages of AC were not that particularly great. AC has a significant advantage for distance of transmission, since it is not affected by impedance. Losses due to impedance with DC, and the need to be physically proximate to the generating station because of this, are why Edison Electric lost the bid to build the power generating station at Niagara Falls. Tesla is also named on most of the basic patents for AC motors; he invented two and three phse motors, as well as brushless motors. In addition, he was able to successfully prosecute a prior art claim against Marconi for the invention of radio, in that he demonstrated a remotely piloted vehicle (a submarine) before Marconi's claim to have invented radio (Marconi was one of Tesla's assistants). Tesla is one of my heros. 8-). > >o When Honda introduced the CRX/HF, a 72 MPG carbuerated > > car into the US in the early 90s, US automakers tested > > one to destruction and then lobbied to change the safety > > standards to pos-facto render the car "unsafe" (the car > > I currently drive gets ~64 MPG freeway; no it is not a > > CRX/HF). > > How did they "lobby"? To the government? Yes. > If so, it's government lock in. Nothing so blatant. > If not, then the problem was simply that people aren't omniscient > and didn't realize it was superior. In that case, no lock in is > involved. And if this is lock in, it's inexplicable by economic > theory, since it's not clear why there are compatability > advantages or network effects of any kind. (So this example can't > be used to validate the theory of lock in) I wasn't attempting to validate the theory of lock in, I was attempting to show where superior technologies fell by the wayside because of anticompetitve practices by companies with inferior technology. > > o DAT was effectively lobbied out of existance as a music > > recording standard by the record industry, for fear of > > perfect digital reproduction of CDs. It was first sentenced > > into recording at a beat frequency relative to the CD data > > rate, and then further banished by other ridiculous > > restrictions having nothing to do with the technology. > > This is government lock in. This is actually a recordig industry lock in, since the government was not involved; the specifics I am referring to is the format standardization based on recording industry pressure on the DAT manufacturers. A governmetn lock in, the so-called "DAT tax", was also present, but relatively insignificant, according to earlier pricing arguments. > > o DIV/X would have been a superior vehicle for Internet > > based rental of videos; it was effectively driven out > > of existance by greedy attempts to apply the technology > > to the inappropriate target of retail sales-as-rentals. > > This is not lock in. Nobody was locked into anything. I'm locked into paying return postage on Internet based rentals of videos. > This was just a case of a company bungling a product. Plenty > of possibly superior technologies don't see the light of day > at all, that doesn't lock anybody in to anything. Except the status quo? > > o IBM PCs are Intel based instead of Motorolla based. > > Enough said, I think (other than "segments are for worms"). > > This is a case where the advantages of compatability outweight > the costs of lock in. So you admit that it's a "lock in", by your definition? Compatability is only an issue when software vendors don't port, BTW. > Considering the costs of adopting the new technology, it is no > longer superior. Cost and technological superiority are orthogonal. We do not consider cost when we discuss technical superiority. > Had Intel _not_ been able to come up with more and more > powerful x86-based processors, this would be a perfect example. > But since Intel has kept their technology competitive, it's not. Says you, as a consumer instead of an engineer. If we are going to make a cost argument, let's add up all the engineering hours spent trying to overcome the segmented address space to make the Intel architecture into a virtually flat address space machine. Even then it's imperfect: I can only fault on page boundaries, so I have to double-map the boundary page between text and data in order to keep the text from getting modified. The compiler writer hours spent on producing PIC compiler output alone would justify the move... all of these extra engineering costs get passed onto consumers. > > o The US television system was well established as being > > NTSC based, when the superior PAL technology for color > > representation was released. The US did not adopt it. > > Government lock in. Actually, not. The FCC standardized the format post-facto. > > o The Japanese HDTV market is currently locked into an > > analog broadcast standard. > > Government lock in. Actually, it was done by manufacturers rushing anolog equipment to market. This is another post-facto standard. > > o Due to the "space race" for the moon, the US scrapped > > plans for a space station and shuttle-like system, with > > a ground-to-orbit, orbit-to-moon, moon-to-orbit plan, > > for the "big-ass-rocket-approach" (Apollo), with the > > result that it's taken us over 30 years to approach the > > ability to maintain a permanent manned space presence, > > and it will be a decade or more before we colonize the > > moon. > > This is just an example of people not having clear crystal balls. > It's not lock in. Having clear crystal balls is what we pay these people to do. > > I've got thousands of examples of this, since I've made rather > > a study of human stupidity... > > Which are the ones that are lock in? If the economic theory of lock > in is correct, there should be many clear examples. I don't understand your affinity to this one, single, aspect of illegal use of monopoly power as it applies to Microsoft. Is this the one, single, illegal use to which Microsoft did _not_ put their monopoly power? PS: If you want another example of non-government lock in, you have only to look at Standard Oils practices of price fixing and of preventing non-company owned stations from being able to obtain gasoline for sale. This was the original reason for the initial Antitrust Legislation. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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