No, it is not. What happens when one is a monopoly, is that one has
to act within certain constraints that would otherwise not apply,
because it is leveraging monopoly status that can be a crime.
That's why it's important to preserve at least some sort of token
competition, so that by claiming one is not a monopoly, one is thus
free to act more agressively than one would be allowed otherwise.
There is no "Anti-trust" act. Perhaps you mean the "Sherman Anti-Trust Act,"
the "Clayton Act," or the "Wilson Tariff Act." However, all "trust" acts
deal with collusion amongst erstwhile competitors, not monopolies.
Yes, there are concerns when a few number of competitors act in
concert as a cabal, thus subverting the hoped-for consumer benefits
that competition can provide. This is more likely when there are a
limited number of competitors, but can also happen when there are
barriers to entry for new competitors.
For example, a business sector may have a representitive or regulatory
body that sets standards for practice. By manipulating these
standards and/or creating loopholes whereby members can be expelled
from the sector, the body can force even a large number of competitors
to act in lock-step in an anti-competitive manner.
When one is a monopoly, other kinds of abuse are possible, beyond
(say) simple price fixing. One is in unilaterally dictating terms of
use, such as EULAs or OEM agreements (price is just one highly-visible
example of this). Another is to leverage a monopoly in one sector to
grab market gains in other sectors, or to cross-subsidize entry into
these sectors at low price points that are untenable for competitors
who do not have an uncontested hi-margin product to fund it.
Even so, being a monoply is not a crime per se, in fact monopolies are
explicitly sanctioned and encouraged by the very first Article in the
Constitution (Article I, Section 8).
In certain sectors, a single standard (monopoly?) is highly desirable.
Whenever PC technology has vaulted forwards, it has been due to the
creation of standards that provide a solid base for freer competitive
development. Examples:
- software, when PC closed out a plethora of home computer tribes
- hardware, when the "clones" kicked IBM's PS/2 into orbit
- apps, when Windows standardised the UI
- games, when DirectX standardized 3D and sound APIs
- fast graphic cards, when VL and then PCI standardised the bus
- hard drive capacity and speed, when IDE standardised controller
Examples are not limited to PCs; the EU and AU are both attempts to
achieve economies of scale to match the USA's advantage of economic
co-operation between states.
Microsoft is a practical monopoly, true, but there is a force equally as
powerful that serves as a Microsoft competitor: Microsoft itself. Unless
Microsoft creates new products, to compete against its existing offerings,
the revenue stream essentially becomes a trickle.
There is scope for the artificial creation of demand; at some point,
one might expect PCs to be fast enough to do whatever's required and
to have had sufficient years of development to perfect core
applications such as word processing and spreadsheets.
One can create new value by using new power to do new things, e.g.
harness those 6 sound jacks as a 4-in, 2-out multitrack recording
system that puts "studio recording" within reach of consumers.
Or one can glitz up content, e.g. movies within web pages and business
documents, etc. That may work, up to a point.
But in practice, the need to fix exploitable defects is what keeps
developers occupied - and this diverts resources from the development
of new products. Users rightly expect bug-fixes to be free, so if the
balance between pre-and post-release development flips from 80/20%
over to 20/80%, there will either be a lot less new sware and revenue,
or higher staffing and resource costs to maintain the same output of
new products. That not only trims margins, but increases the risk
should a major roll-out fail to generate expected uptake and sales.
The current "pay once to use forever, don't pay again unless you like
the features of the upgrade" model is effective where costs can be
predicted, and makes sense when most development costs were
pre-release. That worked with the Win9x pattern of a new OS every 2-3
years, with each new release being a pay-for feature-driven upgrade.
It works less well with the pattern of NT releases; new versions every
5 years or more, with multiple free Service Pack re-writes in between.
Sidebar: This may be one reason MS is becoming insistent on locking
OEM Windows to the original PC, so that the 3-year hardware cycle
ensures new license sales even if it's the same OS, i.e. so that the
old PC's OS is not re-used on the new one?
Now you can posit that the break-fix cycle is artificially created to
obsolete software more quickly, and exploit a future "rental slavery"
(or "software as a service") model. I have some doubts about that,
for two reasons; one, the current impact that huge and ongoing
post-release development must be having on MS, and two, the fact that
non-MS OSs and applications are experiencing a similar need to release
regular bugfixes and patches.
Here's where it gets tricky... software vendors including MS may need
to change the model from buy-upgrades-if-you-like to "rental slavery",
in order to link revenue to post-release development - but how can a
new relationship between vendor and user be fairly created, if the
vendor's a monopolist and the user has no power at all?
The *real* monopoly lock-in with Windows is not that it has a large %
of share in the OS market - it is that the bulk of applications that
people use are written for (and dependent on) Windows. Changing OS
usually means dumping the applications users want to use, which locks
in those users. Changing OS for application vendors means huge
re-development and skills challenges at the same time they slough off
their entire existing user base.
So one might say, "let Windows be a monopoly OS, but because it is so,
we should empower stronger user input and control over EULAs, etc.".
That's all well and good, but how do you represent users without such
a body being hijacked by a cartel of anyone-but-MS vendors, corporate
IT professionals, or both? It's worth looking at what these interest
groups want, what they have tried to do in the past, etc. before
assuming a bunch of unknown devils would be a nice change.
One thing we (as geeks) need to do, is get our fave social activists
informed on the dangerous issues and trends in the infosphere, and
ensure that what they suggest makes technical sense. No-one wants a
"horse designed by a committee", but we can't afford to let the
software industry unilaterally design the society and laws of
tomorrow... which is what we are allowing by duhfault.
I use the term "industry" rather than "Microsoft" deliberately,
because in the ways that matter most, the entire industry (going
beyond software to hardware and non-code content) seems to be in
lock-step with the same (inherently user-hostile) agendas.
Ah, you know what this post's tag is gonna be...
------------------ ----- ---- --- -- - - - -
The rights you save may be your own
