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Competition is desirable because it aligns with society’s goals of innovation and progress which also imply increased productivity and lower prices. Artificial

by DasIch 5y ago

Competition is desirable because it aligns with society’s goals of innovation and progress which also imply increased productivity and lower prices. Artificial barriers to entry are contrary to that and if they’re not illegal they should be.

falcor84 5y ago
Where do you define this line of barriers becoming 'artificial'?
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  It's artificial when the vendor expends additional time, effort, or funds to construct a barrier, or chooses an equally-priced non-interoperable design that a rational, informed consumer with a choice would reject. If you're expending great effort to write custom DRM or to reinvent open industry standards that you could have installed cheaply, that's artificial. I fully admit that there are natural barriers that occur at times. I don't think that you should be expected to reverse-engineer your competitor's products and bend over backwards to make them work better. Here, for a concrete example, Intel had a clear choice to test whether a processor supported a feature by checking a feature flag - It's in the name, they're literally implemented for that exact purpose - or they could expend extra effort in building their own feature flag database by checking manufacturer and part number. They could have either expended extra effort to launch and distribute their own entire custom Python distribution, or submitted pull requests to the existing main distribution. For another example, Apple could have used industry-standard Phillips or Torx screws in their hardware: Manufacturers had lines to produce them, distributors had inventory of the fasteners, users had tools to turn them. Instead, they went to great expense to build their own incompatible tri-lobe screws, requiring probably millions of dollars in investment in custom tooling and production lines, all for the sake of creating an artificial barrier.
- Sanguinaire 5y ago
  We could start with something similar to the concept of Pareto optimality; Intel could have delivered their maximum performance without preventing optimizations from being applied equally on AMD hardware, but instead they choose to disadvantage AMD without providing anything extra on top of what they could do while remaining "neutral".

by DasIch 5y ago

falcor84 5y ago

Where do you define this line of barriers becoming 'artificial'?

LeifCarrotson 5y ago
It's artificial when the vendor expends additional time, effort, or funds to construct a barrier, or chooses an equally-priced non-interoperable design that a rational, informed consumer with a choice would reject. If you're expending great effort to write custom DRM or to reinvent open industry standards that you could have installed cheaply, that's artificial. I fully admit that there are natural barriers that occur at times. I don't think that you should be expected to reverse-engineer your competitor's products and bend over backwards to make them work better. Here, for a concrete example, Intel had a clear choice to test whether a processor supported a feature by checking a feature flag - It's in the name, they're literally implemented for that exact purpose - or they could expend extra effort in building their own feature flag database by checking manufacturer and part number. They could have either expended extra effort to launch and distribute their own entire custom Python distribution, or submitted pull requests to the existing main distribution. For another example, Apple could have used industry-standard Phillips or Torx screws in their hardware: Manufacturers had lines to produce them, distributors had inventory of the fasteners, users had tools to turn them. Instead, they went to great expense to build their own incompatible tri-lobe screws, requiring probably millions of dollars in investment in custom tooling and production lines, all for the sake of creating an artificial barrier.
Sanguinaire 5y ago
We could start with something similar to the concept of Pareto optimality; Intel could have delivered their maximum performance without preventing optimizations from being applied equally on AMD hardware, but instead they choose to disadvantage AMD without providing anything extra on top of what they could do while remaining "neutral".