>how can i read this discussion taking place? can you e-mail me some of it??
Already done.
>didn't know you were there the other night.
I was up front, actually, wearing my only tie.
>i had hoped the event was going to
>be a bunch of corporate honchos taking me on but it was something less than
>that...
No kidding. They were barely coherent, most of them, and I don't think it was just the Remy at work.
>my comments about microsoft... i was just speaking off the cuff, haven't
>really studied the issue, feel bad that the PCs beat Apple, like the way i do
>about beta home video and other better technologies which lose out to the
>greed of the monopoly interests. i just wondered why the justice department
>was finally getting around to going after somebody when there are so many
>banks, media conglomerates and health care companies which have RUINED the
>country with their mergers. what microsoft has ruined is a more creative way
>to point and click. i know i'm oversimplifying, but my head is in a different
>direction. do i have this wrong???
I doubt that the Justice Dept & 20 states would go after Microsoft if some elements of the business class weren't behind it. My guess is that there's some fear that Microsoft will monopolize electronic commerce (once they've destroyed or bought up all their competitors) and then take advantage of that power. Today they give away their browser, but once they own everything, the sky's the limit. Or something like that.
Microsoft is a perfect example of the abritrariness of capitalist wealth. Microsoft has originated next to nothing. Their first product, Bill & Paul's BASIC interpreter, was based on a language developed at Dartmouth in the 1960s. The first MS-DOS was based on an earlier operating system, CP/M. Windows was stolen from Apple, which stole it from Xerox. Xerox stole the mouse & graphic interface from work done for the Pentagon in the 1960s. There was a letter in the Financial Times the other day listing all the major computer innovations of the last 20 years - Motorola & Intel's processors, the graphic interface, Adobe's graphics software, Aldus' original PageMaker, relational databases, etc. - and Microsoft had nothing to do with any of them. But, through a combination of chance and power, they were able to turn other people's work into a great fortune. The computer industry is usually portrayed as one of brave entrpreneurs, but it's far more cooperative than that, with a long tradition of believing that information should be free, and with a long tradition of government subsidy too. The computer and the Internet are basically products of decades of Pentagon subsidies, but, as is so often the case, the public bears the R&D and startup costs, and capitalists claim the profits.
Doug