Microsoft Hatred FAQ

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:52:38 -0700, David Schwartz wrote:

> The court's determination of the relevent 
> market, on wich all of their other decisions were predicated, was arbitrary 
> and bizarre, and the law did not provide any notice of how the market would 
> be determined.

You keep saying that, as if people could do their word processing and run
their financial accounting software on the micro-controllers of microwave
ovens or the computer in their car engine.

The market of desktop PC is a perfectly obvious and natural market. You
are the one insisting on arbitrarily lumping together who knows what other
products in with the desktop PC. I say "who knows" for a reason -- the
only two examples you have come up with were Apple Macintoshes and
desktop PCs running Linux (both less than 5% of the market *now*, and
even less back when the court was investigating Microsoft). Making your
position even more bizarre, both of these products were recognised by the
court as part of the market in question, both were recognised as potential
competing products put at risk due to Microsoft's illegal behaviour.


>     In the sense of interchangeability, almost all operating systems are
> monopolies. 

You don't know what the word monopoly actually means in either law or
economics, do you? What you have written is a perfectly grammatical
sentence that makes no sense whatsoever. If OSes are monopolies, then they
are NOT interchangeable -- but you state in the very next sentence that
they are.

> And if you go by application, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD
> are all interchangeable -- there is nothing significant you can do on
> one that you can't do on the other.

Try telling that to a business that needs to do computerised book-keeping
of wages and payroll.



-- 
Steven.