Wow, Guest.  Your “comment” makes you look so incredibly juvenile, I am going to leave it for every other person who comes along to look at it and laugh.

[quote author=“ERNesbitt”][quote author=“gopher”]
Generally in the computer market… or any other market for that matter, you buy what you need.  If I’m doing Multimedia or digital recording… I’ll buy that Dual G4 with OSX so that I can run the recording software I need.  If I need to render 3D graphics for Industrial Light and Magic (That’d be the coolest job I think I’d ever have)  I’d be working on a $30K Silicon Graphics machine.  I need project scheduling, I need AutoCAD and I need project estimation software… (and I like my games).  Let’s face it… the software just isn’t available for the Mac.  Maybe OSX will improve that.  But more machine for you money?  The only difference is the OS.  1.2MHz is 1.2MHz no matter what.  Windows screwed up with Me and 2000.  XP is noce, but it’s still not as stable as it could be.  I have NT 4 at home and I haven’t had that machine crash since I loaded it last year.  I’d be happy to put it to the test against a similar Mac.

Good points!!! And you and I share a fondness for NT 4. I think I like Win2K more than you, but NT 4 is truly killer.  :x

Mitch

[quote author=“ERNesbitt”]
Netscape has this too.  They are required to have it so that if the Feds ever catch you looking at kiddie porn, they have an undeleteable record of what you’ve been downloading.  To get rid of it, just format every once in a while (1-2 years) and re-install everything.

thank you for the info, i did not know that netscape did that, too.  or at least in version 4.7 (which is what we are up to at my workplace)  and the last time i tried to format and re-install my pc, it caused major problems and downtimes.  and i am not allowed to do that to my computer at work.

at home i use iCab.  still in the beta, but i really don’t have problems with it.  maybe i don’t hit the demanding websites.

As for spyware… look no further than your Gnutella network browser.  KaZaA, Morpheus, and Limewire all have built in spyware. 

don’t have any of those.  and i guess that’s a good reason not to.

Apple is not a monopoly

In order to determine if someone has a monopoly, the necessary first step is to figure out exactly what you think they might have a monopoly on.  There’s a process for how to do this in antitrust law.  Let’s say Ford Explorers. Just saying that Ford has a monopoly on Ford Explorers is a meaningless statement though.  Surely, a monopoly isn’t just a brand name product.  Why do we call them brand name products then?  Because a monopoly is something else.

A monopoly is when one firm controls things that are reasonably interchangeable or if there isn’t anything that’s reasonably interchangeable.  The key is figuring out what how something is used and from that what consumers can (or would) switch to if the price suddenly shot way up.

The water analogy is a good one.  So you start with, say, Evian water.  What if the price of Evian shot way up? Maybe you’d switch to another bottled water. What if all bottled water went way up in price? You’d probably switch to drinking tap water, or maybe start drinking Coke or fruit drinks, or whatever. What if tap water suddenly shot up in price?  You can’t take showers or water your lawn with Coke, or milk, or beer, or any of a million other liquids out there.  So you’d either have to live with the higher price or use less water. The point is there are lots of things that are reasonably interchangeable with Evian bottled water—there’s nothing that’s reasonably interchangeable with water, not for the purposes that most water gets use for anyway. 

If one company controlled 80% of the water in the world and then jacked up the price, there is no way enough people could stop using that company’s water and start using someone else’s instead. That company would be a monopoly because it would have the ability to jack up prices and not lose enough customers to make jacking up the prices unprofitable. But just being a monopoly isn’t against the antitrust laws.

But if a monopoly actually does jack up prices or tries to tell someone they won’t get any more water unless they stop being friends with someone the monopoly guy doesn’t like,—those would be violations of the antitrust laws.  Or if some potential competitor came up with a way of manufacturing a perfect substitute for water—but they can’t get any financial backing, or factory space, or advertising because the guy who currently controls most of the water threatens to cut the water off from anyone who leases space or makes an investment in the guy with the idea.

Microsoft is not in court just because some version of its operating system runs on more than 80% of the world’s computers.  It’s not even in court because it likes to play hardball in its business dealings.  It’s in court because it stepped over the line.  It acted to preserve its dominance by preventing others from being able to compete.

[quote author=“ERNesbitt”]For EDGar: MHz is a measurment of frequency… just like cubic meters is a measure of volume.  1m^3=1m^3 just as 1MHz=1MHz.  It’s OS performance that really determines speed.

yes, technically 1Mhz=1Mhz, but 1Mhz on processor A may do a different amount of processing than 1Mhz on processor B, that is all I meant, I didn’t think you were being so literal  

It is not just OS performance or Mhz that really determines speed, witness windows on an AMD system vs windows on an intel system both with chips running at identical frequencies and otherwise similarly configured. 

cheers

and no back to your regularly scheduled programming… 

this discussion is amusing. while all tend to get the problem of discussing monopoly.  the confusion and lack of clarity seen in the discussion is most closely brought into focus by bucky. 

first when discussing monopoly, you must understand that the term is an abstraction.  in reality, it refers to any firm or industry that is sufficently large as to affect market price or industry price by controling output.  public policy and the press tend to use the word monopoly as a catch all for any anticompetitive practice.  the reality is that it is an abstract concept.

so how can we look at microsoft, i.b.m, apple or an apple farmer?  the answer is analysis.  the truth is that any company can be MONOPOLISTIC but almost no company is a monopoly.  there are several indexes that rank companies on their level of monopoly but they do not give an accurate picture of what’s happening in the real world. 

microsoft is on of the few firms that is a monopoly in several markets but it is not an industry; if it were, it would be an ideal monopoly.  analysis of the markets that microsoft participates in shows the deadweight the company creates.  this deadweight shifts all benefits from the consumer to the company. 

every person with cash in hand willing to buy an operating system has demand for the operating system market.  microsoft can raise and lower the price and supply of their products to get the little old lady that is not willing to pay for a new computer and an operating system.  they are also able to charge hundreds of dollars to the poor soul that is grandfathered in to the evil empire.  sound familiar: it is the same tactic that apple uses and ibm. 

a modern day cliche is “microsoft is unique.”  this is true yet again because they alone can make it very very difficult for a new firm to enter the operating system market. whether with price or a baseball bat that a simpson’s cartoon episode alluded.  this is why they are in legal trouble.

operating systems, tennis shoes, music groups or 19th century steel producers all use monopolistic policies.  the sad truth is that any company that tries to make their product different in your mind is trying to gain monopoly power.  whether we all pay the same price for a product or any price that will give a company profits.  thats why an apple farmer can never set the price for which she sells her apples.  i am not a die hard farmer linda’s apple fanatic so she would be broke if she raised the price. the apple industry is competitive.  thanks to mac i didnt care that i had to pay $500 more for my ibook.  they have done a great job convincing me that the more expensive computer is better.

finally, a quick test to see if anything is monopolistic is to see if you use better or worse to describe it.  the frequency of use can tell you how much monopolistic power its producer really has.

m. crockett
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
(a die hard mac fan)
050902

Apple sure is monopoly

M$ ABUSED its power, ‘cause PC people are dependent on it.
Apple is abusing its power, ‘cause Mac people are dependent on it.
(held hostage by previous investments in hardware/software/operating knowledge learning curve, etc.)

By their behavior, they are abusive monopolists.

If Apple had competition, they wouldn’t have guts to force users into a primitive world of file name extensions, give users no option on many personal preferences issue (antialiased text, big typeface, etc. - these are set by personal preference of ONE PERSON, monopolist himself CEO Jobs - if this guy had the power of M$, things would’ve been much worse)

Sung Gold

Re: Apple sure is monopoly

[quote author=“Anonymous”]M$ ABUSED its power, ‘cause PC people are dependent on it.
Apple is abusing its power, ‘cause Mac people are dependent on it.
(held hostage by previous investments in hardware/software/operating knowledge learning curve, etc.)

By their behavior, they are abusive monopolists.

If Apple had competition, they wouldn’t have guts to force users into a primitive world of file name extensions, give users no option on many personal preferences issue (antialiased text, big typeface, etc. - these are set by personal preference of ONE PERSON, monopolist himself CEO Jobs - if this guy had the power of M$, things would’ve been much worse)

Sung Gold

Are you saying you have to be able to have preferences for EVERYTHING in the OS? Do you moan about “Oh, I want to make my menu bar 2mm thicker. I want size 485 font in my browser, I want to have smaller icons…...blah blah.”

You need SOME “defaults”.

I really don’t think Steve spends time thinkin “I want a big type face…etc”. He spends more time thinking about Mac OS X 10.2!

Congrats to Bucky and Crockett. Well said. =)

To Sung Gold, Apple may own the whole computer, but at least if you don’t like using a Mac, you can switch over to using Windows, without too much difficulty. It’s much harder, and in many cases, impossible to switch from Windows to either Linux or Macintosh, since there are so many services that are Windows only. Microsoft has encouraged that though proprietary Windows only technologies.

The technique of “Embrace and Extend” is one of the key issues where they got in trouble: They took an open standard, which is supposed to foster compatability, then added their own extentions to it, making a version that only works on Windows systems. They did this with Java, with Kerberos, and they tried very hard to do it with all of the WWW page specifications. This is why they got hit for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows; because not because they embedded an application in the Operating System, but because this bundle gave them more clout to force proprietary Microsoft technologies onto the otherwise Open internet, and close it off to competing browsers and Operatig systems. The large number of online services that require Internet Explorer, or a Windows PC system are evidence of how well Microsoft has been doing in this arena.

All companies have proprietary technologies to give them a competitive example. Microsoft is the only company with enough presence to use those technologies to force competitors completely out of their market, and to lock customers into using their Operating System, and no other.

Not as easy to switch to PC as you may think

Although at this point the user interface of a PC may be “similar” to a mac os, the cost of obtaining new software for most of us would be astronomical. I would need to spend approximately $ 6000. to have the software I need to do my work, if I switched to a PC. In addition, I don’t think Final Cut Pro runs on a PC.

Re: Not as easy to switch to PC as you may think

[quote author=“haasenphefer”]Although at this point the user interface of a PC may be “similar” to a mac os, the cost of obtaining new software for most of us would be astronomical. I would need to spend approximately $ 6000. to have the software I need to do my work, if I switched to a PC. In addition, I don’t think Final Cut Pro runs on a PC.

Easy is not the point, nor is identical. the point is _possible_.

Although the cost of changing your applications is going to be prohibitive, most, virtually all services on the mac have Windows analogs. Cost can also be spread out over time by replacing systems and software as they become obsolete.

While you can’t get Final Cut Pro on a PC, you _can_ get any one of many video editing programs, and get the same results. It may not be as easy, cheap, or fun, but it’s possible.

Because of the prevalence of windows in the marketplace, and the prevalence of Microsoft-only proprietary technologies, many companies are dependant on these technologies, and cannot switch to Mac or Linux without losing vital services. It becomes impossible for a company to give up Micorosft if that’s the only way their computers connect to a service vital to running the company, or to a business partner that is using an MS only solution.

Is Apple a monopoly ?

It is a age old discussion of monopoly.

Apple has exclusive product which it produces and supplies OS for it and sells either directly or through other means. All products are tested and conform to their quality standard.

I know when they incorporated clock while processor is waiting or doing something. They did not invent it.  It used to be freeware by Mac enthusiast. They have specs and if you do not like what they make buy something else.

But MS does not sell the hardware and supplies the OS so that you can use the software. But in the last two years through the legal system we have found out how they achieved the status which was deemed monopoly.

I found out that if somebody donates the used computer using MS operating system He can not remove the operating system from the computer and has to give all the original copies and documentaion as well as disks which came with the computer. ( As stated in the EULA agreement ).

There is more to this word monopoly than what is in the dictionary and how it is interpreted in common language, scholar language , political language or legal language makes it more open to discussion than the facts in any situation.

I could not help it.  I had to write it today.

I really enjoyed this discussion. In the end I think Apple can not be considered a Monopoly because it does have a large market share. If it did it might be considered more of a problem than Microsoft because it would be more of a vertical monopoly.

The real problem, in my opinion, with monopolies, is they do not stimulate competition which does not stimulate technoligal advancement.

Having a monopoly is not illegal.
Abusing a monopoly is.

The question then becomes, if Apple ever gets to the point where they actually do have a monopoly, would they abuse it?

“With great power comes great responsibility.”