Well, the very idea of anti-trust is an admission that markets don't work right without forcible intervention by governments. Real market worshippers are opposed to anti-trust on, I laugh to use the word, "principle." And anyway, any capitalist believes that "competition and market-schmarket work" if and only if he personally is making a profit. They just say that crap in order to delude particularly inattentive voters who don't remember things like that S&L bailout.
Besides, Linux is outside of markets. For there to be a market, money or at least something of value must be exchanged, right? Linux is free! Linux does not compete with Microsoft OSes. Linux does not take away market share; it destroys market share. It's hard to understand how the Wall Street crowd can fail to cringe at the thought, from an ideological point of view. Has this notion has escaped their notice?
But Wall Street only pays lip service to the spiritual ideals of the market system anyway, they're looking at it from the point of view that Microsoft is at war with all the other businesses. All the other American companies resent like crazy subsidizing Microsoft's amazing profits out of their revenues. I'd bet there's nobody who thinks his company got its money's worth out of the forced upgrade from Office 95 to Office 97, for example. We all did it anyway, though, partly thanks to Microsoft's lock on secret, proprietary file formats, and partly thanks to the fact that 99% of new computers come with the latest version of Microsoft's crap, whether you wanted it or not.
> To my limited understanding of computer technology, uniform standards
> are an asset rather than a disadvantage in this world already plagued
> with compatibility problems. Microsoft monopoly on the operating
> system provides such uniformity
I'm not trying to insult you, but wow-eee! are you ever wrong about that. Microsoft's so-called standards change every couple of years, never for technical reasons half as much as for marketing reasons, and they are never, ever publicly documented. Microsoft is the death enemy of uniform standards. In fact, even when someone else has made and publicly specified computer standards - e.g. HTML or Java - Microsoft constantly tries to "extend," that is ruin, those standards.
> and I view it essentially as a good thing, and antidote against
> anarchic competition and proliferation of company-specific standards
> and formats.
The only sense that it is an antidote is that MS crushes all their competitors, thus reducing the number of secret, proprietary "standards" to one. But even then MS constantly changes their file formats and protocols, damn them, which is why we Microsoft customers are on an expensive and unending upgrade treadmill. Progress in computing will inevitably lead to new standards, and that's good. Let a thousand standards bloom! Just document the damned things!
> The only problem with Microsoft is not its monopoly but its private
> ownership - but that can be easily fixed. Have you guys and gals
> forgotten that brave and proud word NATIONALIZATION?
>
> The nationalization of the Windows operating system would effectively
> solve most of the problems computer geeks are now bitching about,
...provided their source code was made public.
> specifically:
>
> 1. It would provide a neutral platform for all specialized
> applications
> 2. It would prevent using OS as a marketing scheme to undercut
> competition
> 3. It would prevent planned obsolescence that require constant
> "upgrading"
> 4. It would make public imput/improvement possible (in the way Linux
> is now).
>
> Nationalization may now be a dirty word thanks to the libertarian /
> yuppie trolls populating the computer geekoland
...not only not one in ten of these mouthpieces could write and compile "hello.c," but on top of that they're bone-ignorant of history, thus disqualifying them 100% from speaking with any authority about politics, sick of reading to their half-baked neo-con horseshit...anyway, real geeks all want Microsoft neutered and free software for all...
> - but socialists and marxists should know better, no?
Good luck getting Microsoft nationalized, bro', but, hey, wait! Screw software, what's more important, computer software or food? Let's nationalize Monsanto first!
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net