Re: Boycott Microsoft

[cbbrowne@news.hex.net (Christopher Browne)]

On Thu, 14 May 1998 16:18:50 -0500, Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net> wrote:
>Edwin E. Thorne writes ...
>> The USA is not a pure capitalistic environment.   We have a modified
>> capitalism system, wherein the government regulates some aspects of the
>> market.
>
>     When it comes to computer stuff, the USA (and everywhere else) is
>about as close as it is possible to come to a pure capitalist
>environment. This has been true for years. It is _why_ computers are so
>dirt cheap.

a) In a "pure" capitalist environment, unions would be unable to have
much influence.

After all, unions do not own the "means of production," therefore there
is no reason for them to receive any return from the use of factories. 

The fact that unions *do* commonly have substantial influence
represents a serious imperfection in the "purity" of capitalism in the
USA and elsewhere.

b) This can further be applied to "profit sharing" plans. 

The increasing prevalance of profit sharing goes counter to the notion
of "pure capitalism."

I'm afraid that I have a really tough time seeing how most of the
"pro-capitalism" arguments have *anything* to do with the concept of
capitalism. 

Quite separate from "philosophy of capitalism," which doesn't clearly
have anything to do with any of this, computers have become "dirt cheap"
due to the orthogonal issue of *COMPETITION IN THE MARKETPLACE.* 

The presence of multiple vendors competing against one another has
encouraged increases in functionality along with declining prices. 

- The competition between AMD, Intel, Cyrix, Fairchild, NSC, Motorola,
IBM, MIPS, Digital, Samsung, and others has resulted in increases in CPU
power. 

- Competition between memory vendors such as Siemens, Toshiba, amongst
others, has resulted in the low RAM prices that we see today.  Higher
capacity RAM chips are available cheaper now than they ever were before. 

- Other components have seen similar effects, as bigger or faster or
otherwise superior components such as monitors, disk drives, modems,
network controllers have improved commonly whilst simultaneously getting
cheaper. 

Note, in contrast, that Microsoft's products and actions are visibly in
stark contrast to this.  They have been consistently and quite visibly
driving competition out of the marketplace, with the following visible
results:

- Windows NT 4.0 is not cheaper than 3.51, or 3.5, or ... 

- Public pricing of Windows 95, the last time I saw it on the shelf, was
$195.  That's *more* expensive than MS-DOS was five years ago.  (To use
other prices than $195 would be to compare apples to oranges...)

- Microsoft's "office" products have not been getting cheaper.  One
would expect that if there had been comparable effects to what has
happened in the hardware realm that MS-Office would be priced at about
$5 by now. 

To the contrary, as the amount of competition in this area declines as
Microsoft "encourages" would-be competitors to leave the marketplace,
prices have *not* fallen, and they have been substantially *increasing*
prices by virtue of licensing changes that forbid cross-installation of
the "work copy" on a "home PC."

- Development tools that used to cost $99 when Borland, Lattice, and
others provided competition now cost $400 or more. 

- Beta editions of SQL Server may have been given away, but are costing
more and more over time.

It is quite typical for people to bring up "protecting capitalism" when
they want to disagree, but haven't any real arguments against the
anticompetitive actions in the marketplace.  

Capitalism only works when it goes hand in hand with an open,
competitive market environment.  In situations where competition is not
present, it is merely a different way of implementing tyranny.  

"Downtrodden peasants" won't see any practical difference between:
a) A hereditary Duke or Count,
b) A commissar elected by a soviet in which they have no useful
representation, 
c) An "elected President-for-life former Generalissimo",
or
d) Chairman of the Board.

(which respectively provides the sorts of leaders present under
feudalism, communism, fascism, and capitalism). 
-- 
"The problem might possibly be to do with the fact that asm code written
for the x86 environment is, on other platforms, about as much use as a
pork pie at a jewish wedding."-  Andrew Gierth in comp.unix.programmer
cbbrowne@hex.net -  <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>