Microsoft is a monopoly.

Economics Economics Questions
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1

I have issues with the book “Antitrust: The Case for Repeal” because Microsoft is a monopoly. It has a 100% monopoly on the Microsoft operating system. Now, just because it has to compete with other operating systems does not mean it has any less of a monopoly on the Microsoft operating system. And the reason it has a monopoly is because of patent law.

Just like the fruit market has different kinds of fruits, the operating systems market has different kinds of operating systems. However, in the fruit market, no one is given a monopoly over one kind of fruit by the government. No one is granted ownership all of the oranges. So there are many different producers of oranges. However, in the operating systems market, Microsoft has been granted a monopoly on the Microsoft OS.

Since [Armentano, Dominick T.](http://store.mises.org/search.aspx?Keywords=Armentano, Dominick T.) does not even seem to understand this, I have a hard time reading the book. I mean, how can you argue against anti-trust law while at the same time using a government created monopoly?

2

You have got to be kidding me. Anything is a monopoly is you define its market in the smallest way possible. Actually the Bashes down the street is a monopoly because it is the only grocery store on the block. Should the government step in and make sure there is atleast two grocery stores on every block? Apple is the sole seller of the iPod. I suppose the government should take away their patent and give it out to create more competition in the marketplace. My mom is an artist and owns a painting that she painted that is one of a kind. She has a monopoly on that specific painting! Oh no! My mom is a monopolist! I suppose I should start looking for a lawyer…

3

Spideynw,

Are you new to Austrian economics and/or libertarianism?

There are libertarians here, myself included, who reject intellectual property. Do a search for Stephan Kinsella on IP. And on Google do one for Roderick Long as well.

But there is nothing inherently wrong or bad about being the only provider/seller of something. What is bad/wrong is getting the government to enforce it.

4

Ok, if you want to go with “microsoft is a monopoly because it has a 100% monopoly on the microsoft operating system” then I can say sun microsystems has a 100% monopoly on Java. I can say Blizzard has a 100% monopoly on World Of Warcraft. I can say Nintendo has a 100% monopoly on the Wii. I can say News corp has a 100% monopoly on Fox. Turner broadcasting has a 100% monopoly on CNN. Shall I go on?

5

True, and I have a monopoly on the use of my own body. If, by the way, you are a user of Linux and have a need to use programs designed to run on Windows you may want to have a look at WINE. http://www.winehq.org/

6

My point was that Microsoft OS is a government granted monopoly. Java probably would be considered one as well. I am not sure what patents Blizzard has for WoW, but they probably have some patents they are using, so this is probably also a government granted monopoly. I would imagine Nintendo has a patent on the Wii as well.

I am not really sure about the legalities of television broadcasting, so I could not speak to those.

7

We are not talking about a monopoly to use one single item. We are talking about a monopoly on producing one single item.

8

Depends on what you mean by “new” to Austrian economics or libertarianism. I am a staunch libertarian. On the Austrian quiz (http://mises.org/quiz.asp) I scored something like a 95%. However, I have only been a libertarian for about a year and a half. Four years ago I was a staunch statist and mild socialist.

And I agree that there is nothing wrong with being the sole provider of a good, if it is because of a free market. However, Microsoft is the sole provider of Microsoft OS because of the government.

9

I used to dislike Microsoft a great deal, but I have become convinced that a lot of the accusations are baseless and they ignore the existance competition as well as overstating the quality of the offering of the competitors they beat. That is not to say they are the good guys (just recently, they were accused of bribing government officials in Nigeria), but nobody without a bias would buy that their Netscape competition was unfair (especially when you consider that Netscape revenue was primarly from their server line of products, so Microsoft was not even what undermined their economic success). It was the same kind of non-sense that drove me away from a green group here; e.g. bashing “big corporations” for not re-using filtered kitchen oil, instead of actually organizing an operation doing it (not that I think using kitchen oil in diesel engines is that of a good idea – it does work, but I dunno if it doesn’t do any permanent damages that may render the engine unworkable).

Anyway, I think we would do well to replace copyright and patent laws on software by protections on the actual source code, in order to reduce the costs of interoperability, and allow a market on customizations and improving software, and fomenting componentation of code.

In any case, I dislike this sentiment against intellectual property, because it is what allows companies to offset the production cost at distribution by sharing it among all the users. Otherwise, you’d go back to the middle ages where only the king and wealthy nobles could put up with the costs of producing entertainment up front. Software is no different – if you look at “free software”, that have a very lax copyright, you’ll see that only big businesses can organize themselves to make money out of it. But even then, Novell has seen its revenue dropping significatively since it changed its business model. Trolltech, which produce the widely used Qt library, have also never quite gained on their investments, and were finally bought out by Nokia. I love free software, and I have actually been paid for work on products like OpenOffice.org, but if you follow any startup that attempts to go into that model, you’ll see it either dying, or be acquired by a large company. Ximian, for instance, was bought by Novell, when their bank account dropped the $1500 line, and their revenue was mostly from its closed Evolution-Exchange connector, and for development services, not their desktop products which was the reason they made a name, and that were widely used by users that didn’t pay anything back. Lycoris was finally bought by Mandriva when it only had one employee left, the CEO :stuck_out_tongue: (and Mandriva has also had a lot of financial troubles, and are now focusing on government services, including in 3rd world countries). In my country, the only somewhat prosper free software company is one that gets most of its revenue from the education and justice ministries, and they do their best to not comply in providing the source code.

10

Enforcing copyrights costs millions of dollars, so they do not necessarily allow “companies to offset the production cost at distribution by sharing it among all the users”, except for possibly big businesses. As to intellectual property itself, if you really think there is such a thing, then you would have to agree that intellectual property rights should not expire, just like real property rights do not expire.

11

So what?

So long as there is no requirement that I use, buy, pay for, that item, the producers of that item do not have a monopoly.

If you want to argue against the abuses of intellectual property, welcome to the club. But don’t confuse the issue by mixing in irrelevancies.

And you haven’t heard of http://www.ReactOS.org have you?

12

If we had an anarcho-capitalist or minarchist society and patents (or whatever the free-market equivelant might be) were enforced in a free-market way (i.e. reparations or refusing to do business with violators or use you imagination) would you still oppose them? I agree that the current patent system is broken. Government breaks everything it touches. Is it the fact it is government that bothers you or is there something else?

13

I must admit that the longer I use F/OSS, the more I believe WINE to be a “lesser of two evils” stop-gap measure, simply because it delays the writing of the applications for native Linux. Don’t get me wrong, I use it too.

But with the recent advances in virtualization, I’ve come to the conclusion that the few remaining Windows-only applications that do not have F/OSS replacements are better run on a fully functional installation of Windows. Installed, that is, to run on and be protected by a Linux host.

It’s been the experience of me and several others that Windows runs faster virtualized than it does natively, just as disk-intensive applications run faster under WINE than Windows, because of the more efficient filesystems and hardware access in Linux.

I’ve found VirtualBox to be very easy to set up and run. http://www.virtualbox.org/

14

In my country, there are societies of authors that keep an eye on infringements for a small fee. And you have to accept that there will always be people that will circumvene copyright, just like some manage to get into the tram without a ticket (I certainely don’t agree with criminalizing neither, as it is today here, its simply a contract breach to be solved in civil courts). You can disincentive that by providing a less featureful version for free, or distribute trial software with annoying popups for those that are willing to put up with them.

I’m not sure if defining it as property does any good to understand the concept. I don’t like the term intellectual property myself, and I agree that having an expiration limit makes sense. In the case of books, it gives the required incentive for editors to pay for their writers, since they know they’ll have a monopoly on distribution of that work for a certain time frame. After a few years, people already know the book, and the original editor may have already stopped distributing it, so you let all editors do so, whether they contributed to its development or not. Evidence shows that a lot of more creation and distribution of information was originated with such a system. It may not be optimized to software, I agree with that. And the time limits don’t make sense to be so long as they are for some of the mediums.

15

I still do dislike Microsoft a great deal. Not because I think they are unethical but because their software is inferior to software that I can download at no cost (legally). I recently got so sick of Windows that I reformated my two of my computers. I now use Suse Linux on my laptop and Mandriva Linux on my desktop. I have no problem with their hardware. I use a very good ergonomic Microsoft Keyboard. I HATE their software.

16

Ah, I was just about to complain that you can’t clone windows, because gov’t forbids it…

But it seems that indeed you can ??

17

I’ve never used virtual box and will have to give that a try. Thanks. I am a fairly new Linux convert. I am still learning.

18

Trademark pre-exists patent and copyright, and I think it would reassert itself because people want to know who they are buying from. Just looking at how much more a “brand name” can sell a product for, when the identical stuff (sometimes made in the same factory by the same people at the same time) can be bought for much less in a “store brand” or “generic”.

So in Libertopia, Microsoft still produces Microsoft Windows, still sells it precompiled, still has their End User License Agreement to prevent decompiling or re-using of their code, but this time instead of using copyright and patent, they just use the fact that people must agree to the EULA voluntarily in court to enforce their “rights”.

Personal opinion: Microsoft would lose customers to F/OSS big time if they were to actually enforce their EULA vigerously. The vast majority have never read it, just clicking “ok” in order to get past the annoyance. In Libertopia, anyone who did that would be committing legal suicide.

19

Clone isn’t the right term. If I clone a sheep I have an exact replica of that sheep. If I bioengineer an new kind of animal that produces wool that has same texture and feel of sheep’s wool and produces milk that tastes so much like sheep’s milk that it can fool a gourmet chef I havn’t “cloned a sheep.” What I have done is created an an Open Source implementation of the Sheep API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. :slight_smile: By the way, wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine is Not an Emulator.

20

A monopoly is not defined as whether or not a company can force people to buy its product. It is defined as whether or not competitors are allowed into the market.