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Secure Boot, No ThanksSecure Boot, No ThanksPosted Jan 3, 2013 9:38 UTC (Thu) by farnz (guest, #17727)In reply to: Secure Boot, No Thanks by efraim Parent article: The H Year: 2012's Wins, Fails and Mehs
Because it was OK for Microsoft to give their customers and end-users an OS with an integrated web browser, right up to the point where Microsoft attempted to tell their customers that they couldn't install another browser as the system default browser if they intended to sell the machine to an end-user. Android doesn't currently have this problem - if HTC choose to make the system default browser Firefox Mobile, Google aren't going to stop them using Android. If you go back to the mid-90s, when all this went down, other browser developers were in the business of paying OEMs to preinstall their product as the system default browser; Microsoft used its leverage as provider of the OS to insist that OEMs that did this had to pay much more for the OS (more than the other browser vendors were prepared to pay, so an OEM that shipped Windows and IE only paid less than an OEM that shipped Windows and IE and Netscape, even with Netscape paying the OEM to ship Netscape). Had Microsoft simply bundled IE as a freebie with Windows, and not tried to use that as leverage to block OEMs deals with Netscape, they'd not have got into trouble. It was the attempt to use their ownership of a monopoly operating system to influence the browser market that caused them pain, and a lot of observers noted at the time that IE4 was a better product than the equivalent Netscape browsers. Indeed, it's plausible that if Microsoft had behaved better, they'd probably have still crushed the competition in the web browser market as thoroughly as they did, and would not have faced the anti-trust issues that their monopoly abuse caused.
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Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 19:46 UTC (Mon) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Don't forget, it was PROVEN in court that Microsoft put a load of code into Windows ?98 whose sole purpose was to cause Netscape to crash.
So the OP's claim that "Netscape couldn't write a decent browser" is wrong - if the underlying OS has been deliberately booby-trapped it's rather difficult to cope! And there's a long trail of MS repeatedly doing that ... "DOS ain't done til Lotus won't run", and the story coming out now about WordPerfect, etc etc.
To the OP - the best definition of "monopoly power" is "the ability to set a price above the marginal cost of production". MS can pretty much name their own price, so they have monopoly power. Google may be very dominant in search, but they can't set their own price. There are other search engines out there, and if Google raise their prices both sorts of customers (the advertisers and the searchers) can easily go elsewhere. Market dynamics currently push them to Google as the best value for money, but if Google changes that dynamic it's easy for them to flee. Thing with Microsoft is it is (and MS deliberately makes it so) very difficult for customers to flee. The harder MS makes it for customers to leave, the more MS can charge before customers consider leaving.
Cheers,
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 19:58 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
> Don't forget, it was PROVEN in court that Microsoft put a load of code into Windows ?98 whose sole purpose was to cause Netscape to crash.
That's a serious accusation. Can you prove it?
As far as I remember, it was proven that MS has put special hooks to make their applications work faster.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 20:57 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
In a different case, it was proven that Microsoft put in hooks to make windows not work when running on DR-DOS
These weren't 'hooks to make it work better on pure microsoft systems' they were tests to detect DR-DOS and fail.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 8, 2013 18:19 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
No, they were (insanely specific) tests to detect {MS|IBM}-DOS and fail if not found. It just so happens that there was only one DOS-compatible competitor to the {MS|IBM}-DOS hegemony... how convenient.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 20:45 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
> the best definition of "monopoly power" is "the ability to set a price above the marginal cost of production".
I think it should be clear that this is a quite radical re-interpretation of what monopoly means and is not the definition that is commonly understood or that is used in the law.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 22:17 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] To the OP - the best definition of "monopoly power" is "the ability to set a price above the marginal cost of production". This does unuseful things like saying that the Morgan Motor Company has a monopoly, which it doesn't in any meaningful sense.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 22:24 UTC (Mon) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
>This does unuseful things like saying that the Morgan Motor Company has a monopoly, which it doesn't in any meaningful sense.
Can you elaborate? I've never heard of the Morgan Motor Company, and I thought the definition quite usefully cut through the irrelevant connotations that "monopoly" has.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 8, 2013 0:10 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]
IIRC, the Morgan motor company is a very small outfit that makes fancy cars. They can charge way more than »the marginal cost of production« because the people who buy Morgan cars, even though they would be perfectly able to get something like a Yugo at a cheaper price that would also let them drive from A to B, for whatever reason still prefer a Morgan car, and are happy to pay more than they otherwise would have to if their only interest was to obtain a car (any car).
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