4 ms·
Taking advantage of their monopoly is not the bad part IMO. The bad part is doing it in such an tasteless way, i.e. making the product suck. It wouldn't bother
by young_unixer 6y ago
Taking advantage of their monopoly is not the bad part IMO. The bad part is doing it in such an tasteless way, i.e. making the product suck.
It wouldn't bother me if they overpriced their stuff like Apple does or bought every competitor like Facebook does, etc. It only bothers me when they make their product unusable like they've done with Windows.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Taking advantage of their monopoly is not the bad part IMO. The bad part is doing it in such an tasteless way, i.e. making the product suck. They aren’t separate issues. Monopoly is the absence of effective competition (a place people go when you make things worse, whether in cost or UX or otherwise). That's what makes them free to do it “so tastelessly”.
- tomnipotent 6y agoYou still consider Microsoft of 2020 a monopoly?
- d1zzy 6y agoIt is very much still a monopoly for operating systems on personal computers (desktop and laptop). It's just that mobile phones have eaten a lot of the personal computer market so their overall power over people's lives has decreased because of that but it's still very significant.
- tomnipotent 6y agoWhat other supporting evidence besides "still has 70% market share"?. That alone doesn't qualify it as a monopoly.
- freeone3000 6y agoblink Yes it does. That's the defining characteristic.
- tomnipotent 6y agoExcept it's not. It includes high barriers for entry into the market, a single seller, pricing without competition, and other things. Microsoft was considered a monopoly not because of its marketshare, but because of its underlying practices.
- dragonwriter 6y agoThere's still little meaningful meaningful competition in the enterprise desktop/laptop OS market; the scope of the monopoly is smaller, but, yeah, they still have a space where they exercise pricing power without people migrating to alternatives.