2 ms·
>I don't fear Google because the cost of switching is low It is today. And it was with MS back in, what, the 80's? How easy is it to switch a big business of
by loewenskind 16y ago
>I don't fear Google because the cost of switching is low
It is today. And it was with MS back in, what, the 80's? How easy is it to switch a big business off of them now?
The point here is that competition is important, and when one party is using an extremely profitable and largely unassailable part of their business to ensure they don't have to compete in others they choose participate in that is dangerous for legitament competition.
- pohl 16y agoAnd it was with MS back in, what, the 80's? Not in the 80s that I remember. Back then you didn't have a network, or portable file formats, and even the floppy disks - if they were the same size - were formatted differently for every operating system, and switching to another OS often meant switching to a different machine with a different architecture (and machines were damned expensive back then!), and you couldn't expect to take any applications, peripherals, and probably data with you. And those are pressures that apply to those who probably only had one system. If you were a business with more than one microcomputer, or you needed to share data with someone else, then the cost of switching was enormous. In the 80s I lived through, Microsoft was already busy building their empire by keeping customers captive on the upgrade treadmill. We were kept on the treadmill through the high cost of switching, and through the fear of incompatibility with whatever we might want to switch to.