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Posted Sep 11, 2006 22:22 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

That and from my very very limited understanding is that economic models that assume one thing or another about a average person's behavior in regards to having limited vision are pretty flawed.

I don't realy know a lot about it, but it seems to me that especially in business if your not a strategic thinker your not a successfull person. Your simply not going to be able to make a small business into a large one just by dumb luck and a limited view point. Now these people may not have the same view point as yourself, but that doesn't mean that they aren't thinkers.

If your big business you may exist on beurocratic stuff and pure momentum alone, but I don't think that will last.

It would be interesting to see a more complex model with maybe a it bit more 'game theory' mixed into, if that is a correct way of looking at it.

Of course the positive spin you could put on this article is that it does a good job of proving that long-term looking intellegent people should choose Linux because it offers more benifits and lower costs over time.

Posted Sep 11, 2006 22:29 UTC (Mon) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link]

Their model assumes Linus is free and doesn't say anything about costs to develop or bankruptcy. It also doesn't explain how Linux could have gotten started and gotten as far as it did - taken literally, it actually predicts that couldn't happen, so this is already a demonstration that the model isn't quite right. Another aspect that the model doesn't deal with is what type of ROI MSFT stockholders expect - i.e. even if they could theoretically drop Windows price as low as required for steady state, they might not be able to do that in reality.