"One Bullet is never enough" Paper

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "James" == James J Besemer <jb at cascade-sys.com> writes:

    James> Fact of the matter, the simple secret of success in
    James> business is to figure out what your customers want and to
    James> give it to them for a better price than your competition
    James> can.

And the more complex secret to success in "Big" business is to foster
monopoly by figuring out ways to prevent your customers from migrating
to rivals (preferably backed by the government).  Microsoft puts an
enormous amount of effort into (1) legal devices and (2) being
gratuitously different (often in destructive ways---character set
standard non-conformance being an example that has cost yours truly
_much_ pain).

Both of these are purely losses to the economy; you can only argue
they're related to net gain because on balance Microsoft's market
power is beneficial by enforcing standards ("any color you want, as
long as you want black") and accumulating capital to support expensive
development.  Your argument that Microsoft-enforced desktop
standardization is very beneficial is plausible, but let's not confuse
"Microsoft is on balance good for the world" with "Microsoft is always
acting with the overall good of consumers in mind."

    James> And the reason their APPs dominate is because they've
    James> worked on continually refining and improving them for
    James> almost 20 years.

But "refine and improve" is not absolute, it's relative to rivals.  So
that includes bludgeoning or buying competitors, and deliberately
using "worst practice" development strategies (monolithic OS, for
example) which enhance market power while degrading the product.  Not
to mention FUD like trumpeting the "Orange Book C2" security rating of
the Windows NT kernel, while somehow neglecting to note that
installing Word or plugging in the ethernet card violates the
assumptions of a C2 rating.  Of course Microsoft _also_ put vast
resources into producing "good enough" software across the board, and
maybe even occasional "best of breed" implementations.

    James> It's going the next step beyond that and unnecessarily
    James> demonizing the opposition which I find tiresome.

Microsoft is not the threat that the rabid slashdotters claim.  But
Microsoft got big by directing its strategy at beating (or beating up)
the competition, not at satisfying the customer.  Sometimes those are
the same.  Sometimes they aren't.  There may be big social gains to
reining in Microsoft (and maybe there aren't, of course, since doing
so requires the presence of Big Government).

    >> The only thing that scares me about Big Government is that is
    >> is being controlled more and more by Big Corporations.

    James> That's why everyone should fear big government.

Maybe.  I fear Big Government just because it's Big.  Big entities are
vulnerable to Big mistakes.  Those mistakes can be issues of fairness,
as you point out, but they can equally well be simply destructive.
Biodiversity in each ecological niche is good for the ecosystem, and
other things being equal, economic diversity in each market is good
for society.


-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
 My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things.  I don't
have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember.  Scott Gilbert c.l.py