Oh, and lowering prices wouldn't eliminate piracy. <snip>
Neither will eliminating piracy lower prices. Prices are set by what the market
will bear. Eliminating piracy doesn't affect what consumers will pay. If MS
won't lower their prices with $52 billion in the bank (not to mention the tens
of billions more that Gates' and Balmer have reaped from Windows
consumers), what makes anyone think they would if they eliminated piracy?
Same thing goes for the RIAA and music, and the MPAA and movies.
And Microsoft does _not_ have a monopoly.
You don't have to have 100% of the market to be a monopolist. Monopoly is about
having enough control of the market to quash free-market competition. The exact
share varies with the market but 90% is usually considered sufficient to
qualify as a monopoly. The Supreme Court and several state courts in
class-action lawsuits have already labeled MS a "monopoly".
It's not necessarily illegal to be a monopoly - that depends on how a company
got there and how they use or abuse the power it gives them over their
competitors - but legal or not, a monopoly is still a monopoly.
Feel free the use Linux, Unix. FreeBSD, MacOS, or any of the many other
operating systems available.
Are you asserting that the average consumer would find Linux, Unix, or FreeBSD
a viable alternative to Windows? And since they are forced to pay for Windows
anyway to get a name-brand computer at a reputable computer store (Best Buy,
CompUSA, Circuit City), why would they install a different OS?
As for MacOS, Apple's operating systems run only on their own proprietary and
relatively expensive hardware. It's not a realistic option for someone who can
needs more hardware bang for their buck, or who already has a large investment
in Intel hardware.
Do not mistake market dominance for a true monopoly -- Microsoft's the
biggest for the simple reasons that an overwhelming majority of consumers
have either "voted with their wallets," or are too lazy to bother trying to
learn anything else.
Microsoft bought Wendin DOS and took it off the market. They launched a massive
FUD campaign against DR-DOS, rigged the Windows 3.something installer to crash
under DR-DOS and made it look like DR-DOS's fault, and then bundled MS-DOS with
Windows the same way they bundled IE to kill Netscape and more recently bundled
WMA to kill RealPlayer (see the recent EU decision).
As revealed during the antitrust trial, they used secretive and exclusionary
OEM licenses to punish OEM's who carried other OS's like OS/2 and BeOS and to
reward those who shunned those competing OS's. BeOS claims that they didn't
even know *WHY* OEMS were refusing to bundle their product - refused even to
bundle BeOS when they became desperate and tried to give it away just for the
name recognition - because those OEMS were under NDA not to tell them *why*
they were being turned down.
Which leads to the we-can-only-suspect department: Linux has slightly more
desktop share now than Apple, yet the same major computer chains that have a
whole corner devoted to Apple machines don't carry even one single Linux or
Windows-free bare system on their shelves. If you want to go to CompUSA, Best
Buy, or Circuit City and buy a Sony, Toshiba, Hewlett Packard, or any other
brand of Intel machine then you HAVE to pay for Windows whether you want it or
not.
It's no wonder that consumers have voted for MS "with their wallets".
Economics 101: Any business has a right to charge "all the market will bear"
for its products or services. If people don't believe that they're receiving
fair value for the price being asked, all they have to do is buy something
else. It's as simple as that.
More Economics 101: In a free market, competition causes prices to approach the
costs of manufacturing and distribution. Huge sustained profit margins like
Microsoft's are possible only in the prolonged shortage of a commodity (doesn't
happen with readily mass-produced software) or in the presence of a monopoly.
It's notable that the competition that finally did arise could do so only by
bypassing the free market. Open-source software is, by-and-large, written to
satisfy some personal need - and most of us would *much* rather pay $300 for a
commercial program than spend every weekend for the next few years writing it.
The intense long-term effort by the estimated 600,000 developers who brought us
the Linux kernel and over 10,000 open-source applications to run on it would
not have happened if a free market for operating systems had truly existed.
