51–60 of 64 posts
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Are legality and morality interchangeable?
Is morality a foundation of capitalism?
This is silly. Microsoft was a monopoly with 98% of the OS market who was trying to use that monopoly to force their competitors out of business. Remind me again, what company am I supposed to believe is doing that today? Near 100% market share and uncompetitive practices? This comic seems like the opposite of http://xkcd.com/774/ - it's trendy to ignore the abuses of Microsoft in the 90s, or to paint some false equi…
This is silly. Apple is a monopoly with 100% of the iOS market and use that monopoly to shut any potential competitor out of the market. Can you buy ebooks from Amazon from Kindle app? No. Can you have a true Firefox browser on iOS? No. Can you buy apps directly from developers? No. What ever Microsoft did in 90s, is nowhere near as bad as Apple today.
As far as I understand, the problem with MS was that they tried and used their strength in the OS market to gain an advantage in the browser market. What similar cross-market unfair competition are Facebook, Google and Apple blamed for?
I don't know why their was no outcry over this.
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> But really, it seems like it's way less than 95%. No monopoly. Although there are no hard and fast rules, to be considered a Monopoly in the UK, for example, you only need to have a minimum 25% market share. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
That seems like a strange definition. I guess both Apple and Google have monopolies in the tablet market, then, by the UK definition. Although that obviously seems contradictory. I'm going by the typical colloquial definition (which might be closer to the real definition outside the UK), that a monopoly is when there's basically just one option and that market dominance can be used to harm competitors and consumers.
It's one of the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for the OFT to refer a merger to the Competition Commission for investigation under the Enterprise Act[1], if the result would have greater than 25% market share. The other main conditions being that it believes the result would be "a lessening of competition", that it's an important market, etc. That doesn't suddenly make every company with >25% market share a monopoly.
The nearest I can find for the definition of a monopoly, for the purposes of investigating a company on its own (rather than a merger) is "a dominant position in a market"[2], the wording imported from Article 102 TFEU[3].
[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/40
[2] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/41
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_102_of_the_Treaty_on_th...
This is silly. Microsoft was a monopoly with 98% of the OS market who was trying to use that monopoly to force their competitors out of business. Remind me again, what company am I supposed to believe is doing that today? Near 100% market share and uncompetitive practices? This comic seems like the opposite of http://xkcd.com/774/ - it's trendy to ignore the abuses of Microsoft in the 90s, or to paint some false equi…
This is silly. Apple is a monopoly with 100% of the iOS market and use that monopoly to shut any potential competitor out of the market. Can you buy ebooks from Amazon from Kindle app? No. Can you have a true Firefox browser on iOS? No. Can you buy apps directly from developers? No. What ever Microsoft did in 90s, is nowhere near as bad as Apple today.
Microsoft didn't "have a monopoly on Internet Explorer" - they had (still have?) a monopoly on COMPUTER OSes, which they used to force-feed everyone with a BROWSER. It would be a monopoly if Apple's iOS ran in 90% of the phones in the world, but that's not the case today (nor in the foreseeable future)...
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It's funny, because the anti-trust lawsuit revolved entirely around the browser wars and "bundling". However, that law is rather vague bordering on poorly written (many instances of "bundling" are often a benefit to the customer) and was likely misinterpreted besides. Moreover, Microsoft won the browser war as much on releasing an outright better browser in a key time frame when Netscape was having extreme developmen…
There was an antitrust lawsuit from Be about the OEM shit, but it was settled out of court for only $23 million without MS admitting any wrongdoing http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/84708/Microsoft_Be_re... likely because Be was near dead by that point.
By the same token, half the crap on a fresh install nowadays doesn't really benefit either although it's hard to say which direction the money is flowing, I suppose if they're charging me less for installing McAffee/ton of ISPs/etc whatever, I'll opt in and remove them. But I still don't have the option or anything..
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Let's see, are there any important markets out there today where a company has a monopoly? Well, there's the tablet market I guess, where Apple has 95% marketshare. But that's merely a $40 billion a year business with a 70% year over year growth rate so it's not really worth considering, right? And as we all know Apple would never use strong arm tactics like excessive patent litigation to try to hamstring its competi…
I'd say that both Apple and Google both have monopolies over app sales within their ecosystems. And at least one of them seems to be abusing this monopoly power.
The law cares about using earned monopoly power in one market to advantage yourself in another market.
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This is silly. Apple is a monopoly with 100% of the iOS market and use that monopoly to shut any potential competitor out of the market. Can you buy ebooks from Amazon from Kindle app? No. Can you have a true Firefox browser on iOS? No. Can you buy apps directly from developers? No. What ever Microsoft did in 90s, is nowhere near as bad as Apple today.
iOS is a product FROM Apple. They have the right to do whatever they want with it - same for Amazon and the Kindle. Microsoft didn't "have a monopoly on Internet Explorer" - they had (still have?) a monopoly on COMPUTER OSes, which they used to force-feed everyone with a BROWSER. It would be a monopoly if Apple's iOS ran in 90% of the phones in the world, but that's not the case today (nor in the foreseeable future).…
iOS is not a product(you can't buy it separately, can you?), it's a platform that many developers make a living on. When I am saying iOS market, I am actually saying iOS software market.