On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 08:11:09PM +0000, Ian wrote:
On Friday 14 December 2001 04:57, Frank Shute wrote:
It was established in the findings of fact that there is no pressure on them whatsoever to cut their prices. Their margins are obscene & it was a crucial piece of evidence in establishing that they were a monopoly in the first place.
People often have to run Windows whether they like it or not - even I have to run it - and believe me I don't like it. Price is not an issue.
I disagree. If they charged £1000 a machine for Windows you would see a mass rush to Linux. Its a matter of degree.
True.
With proper competition I should think Windows would be less than a tenner without proper competition its £100. If MS did reduce this to say £20 it would make it a lot harder to establish Linux.
They're essentially stuck at charging what they presently charge even if there was proper competition. They can't reduce it because the shareholders have come to expect a suitably huge income as you mention.
If they have lower sales volumes (as is happening) and they keep putting the price up, the economic argument for Linux will eventually get the upper hand.
The lower sales volumes are as a result of fewer sales of PCs with of course their preloaded stuff on every PC you buy. The problem is that Intel & the clone chips give so much now that even MS can't take it away with their bloatware. I think this box is about 3 yrs old (300MHz) and it runs NT, Linux & BSD quite happily so I can't really see me needing another for a few years yet. Although I say that my university says they will give me 250 quid towards a new one which is probably too good an opportunity to pass up. It means I get a 1GHz machine for an outlay of 250 myself =)
The only way to stop this continuing is to regulate & regulate hard.
If the regulators did set a price of say £10 a licence for windows and £10 for Office you could probably say good bye to any real chance of a shift to Linux at the desktop.
They'd never tell them at what price they should sell their products at - that's rightfully a business decision for them to make.
Its why I think on balance it could well be better to give MS enough rope to hang itself. Greed is a difficult emotion for the greedy to resist and if sales volume is reduced by fewer PCs going out there the temptation is to keep putting the price up to maintain the revenue the shareholders have come to expect.
They're not putting up the price per se ie. a copy of NT bought a few years ago is pretty much the price of a copy of 2K/XP today. What they are doing is imposing onerous licence conditions on businesses in particular to ensure that they have to upgrade at MS's whim thus ensuring their revenue. They'll also extend the .NET/Passport stuff & eventually get their customers to move away from TCP/IP and onto a proprietry protocol - that seems to be the game plan. Lock them in even further. This is where their needs to be regulation. Force them to use open protocols so they can be re-implemented by others. Otherwise they'll just carry on like they always have and embrace, extend & proprietrise.
I don't have a BT line at all. Its all NTL, mainly because its cheaper and faster. BT are not doing wonderfully well.
I don't get NTL out in the sticks here. BT & the rest of the telecoms companies aren't doing terribly well because they got screwed over by their respective governments for their 3G licences - which was not good for anybody as they've now got stuff all money to invest in infrastructure & they'll never get more than a fraction back of what they paid for the licences.
So the money has gone into the public purse. Good scam on behalf of the tax payer :-) All depends on your point of view. Personally, I think taxing IT infrastructure is detrimental and will delay things a few years. Delays might actually help Linux as it gives it longer to strengthen and mature before things like .net have tme to establish another monopoly.
I agree with you, taxing infrastructure is detrimental to us all & it's set back the telecoms business back years. I can't see that it particularly helps MS more than Linux or vice versa. We'd all like to see Broadband connections etc. so to my mind it has been a disaster for the development of the industry as a whole. It might have seemed like a good idea to grab a pile of money for the public purse at the time but I think in hindsight it was a damn fool idea & was probably one of the major causes of the recession.
The American political system is undoubtedly as corrupt as anything on this planet and FWIW their legal sytem sucks too in that the more money you've got, the better chance you have of winning your case.
I can think of worse.
Name & shame them! I can't think of any political system where corruption and bribery of the political class is institutionalised in the shape of the PACs (political action commitees).
I should think the Taliban, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Stalin and a few other ran more corrupt governments by a long way.
They weren't corrupt in the way that they could be bought like the American political system. Unpleasant - undoubtedly. But corrupt - not particularly.
Everywhere else it seems to be done on an `ad hoc' basis.
I don't think ethnic cleansing of Jews was particularly ad hoc.
I don't see that corruption & genocide have much in common. -- Frank *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Boroughbridge. Tel: 01423 323019 --------- PGP keyID: 0xC0B341A3 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* http://www.esperance-linux.co.uk/ Bondage maybe, discipline never! -- T.K.