Microsoft Hatred FAQ

[David Schwartz]

"Eike Preuss" <usenet at eikepreuss.de> wrote in message 
news:3s8t89FmdnriU1 at individual.net...

>>     Right, except that's utterly absurd. If every vendor takes their tiny
>> cut of the 95%, a huge cut of the 5% is starting to look *REALLY* good.

> Sure, that would be true if the market would be / would have been really
> global. In practice if you have a shop you have a limited 'region of
> influence'. Optimally you are the only shop in this region that sells
> the stuff, or perhaps there are a few shops that compete with you. Lets
> say in your region are two shops competing with you, and you must decide
> wether to sell product A (95%) or B (5%), but you may not sell both.
> Decision 1: Sell A, share the 95% of the local market with two -> about
> 32% of the local market for all of you, if all perform equally good
> Decision 2: Sell B -> you get the 5% of the market, the others 47% each
>
> This calculation is probably still a very bad approximation of the
> truth, but things are definitely not as easy as you state them.

    It depends upon how different the products are and how easy it is to 
shop out of your local market. If the products are equally good and 
reasonably interchangeable and it's hard to shop out of your local market, 
then you're right. The more the smaller product is better than the larger 
product, the less interchangeable they are, and the easier it is to shop out 
of your local market, the more wrong you are.

    How often do you hear, "I'd like to use Linux, but I just can't get 
ahold of it"?

    And how many people do you hear saying, "I'd like to use Linux, but I'm 
not willing to shell out the bucks to buy it since I already bought Windows 
with my computer".

    On the other hand, where you might be right is in the possibility that 
Microsoft's lock on the market prevented other companies from making 
operating systems at all. That is, that had Microsoft used different 
policies, other companies would have introduced operating systems to compete 
with Microsoft, and we'd all have better operating systems for it. If 
Microsoft's conduct was legal, this argument establishes that the conduct 
was necessary.

    DS