No fault antitrust
Tim May
tcmay at got.net
Wed Aug 8 17:55:52 PDT 2001
On Wednesday, August 8, 2001, at 05:47 PM, georgemw at speakeasy.net wrote:
> I'm not disputing that Microsoft had a monoply BTW. I think it's
> a perfectly reasonable position that Apple's competition is
> sufficiently meager to say that Microsoft has an effective monoply
> on personal computer operating systems. I'm just saying that
> refusing to consider it because it gets its cpus from a different
> vendor was completely fucked up reasoning on the part of the judge.
Anyone who doesn't wish to use Microsoft operating systems is perfectly
free to use the Macintosh OS, as I do, or one of the many flavors or
Linux, or one of the three flavors of BSD, or to buy a machine running
Solaris, or AmigaDOS, or whatever.
The fact that most of the sheeple pick Windows is not a criminal act by
Microsoft.
> I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Who can say what
> possible choices you might have in the future, and when those
> possibilities might be foreclosed? If AMD died off, Intel might
> not have quite as strong an incentive as they do now to keep
> coming up with improved chips, but they'd still have a strong
> incentive, because much of their sales come from people
> upgrading their systems from an old Intel CPU to a new one.
> (Or buying a whole new Intel CPU system to replace the old one).
> This is even truer in the software industry; square cut or pear
> shaped, programs never lose their shape, programs are a girls
> best friend I mean forever.
I happen to know a _lot_ about Intel, for historical reasons, and I can
tell you that Intel is in a vastly stronger "monopoly position" than
Microsoft is. Lots of reasons. I can write a short article explaining
why if there's sufficient real interest.
Do I argue that Intel should be sanctioned? Far from it. In fact, I
argue that anyone who tries to interfere in Intel's ability to sell
products has earned killing.
>
> Oh, one other thing I just thought of. I'm not comfortable with
> the idea that trademarks are priviledges that can be revoked. It
> seems to me that a trademark essentially is a way of attaching
> a reputation for quality to a product, and that "revoking" the
> trademark and allowing any random bozo to use it is
> essentially defrauding the consumer.
Nonsense.
--Tim May
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