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The development costs for Windows (as a common platform, stripped of any add-on that could be provided by other competitive players) are a footnote in the costs

The development costs for Windows (as a common platform, stripped of any add-on that could be provided by other competitive players) are a footnote in the costs of the global software market for Windows. There is indeed a complex problem to be solved of how to organize an open platform so that the development costs are paid, but it's not fundamentally a question of resources. Multiple companies and open source teams have achieved roughly similar feats with many orders of magnitude less resources than what MS rent-extracted from the Windows OS consumers. Ditto for hardware, you need a well defined and stable interface and the vendors will adhere to it once there is critical mass. > Isn't that true for every industry? In almost every such historic example that still exists in some fashion today (railways, energy, telco, utilities etc.), there was strong regulatory action to break up monopolies accompanied by rigorous standardization of the common interfaces. I don't have a problem with competitive players inventing industries and new ways of doing things for the allure of monopoly profit. Just with the sluggish regulatory action in the particular case of computing tech, well past the point where it has become an established and essential resource for society.

DeathArrow 4y ago
> The development costs for Windows (as a common platform, stripped of any add-on that could be provided by other competitive players) are a footnote in the costs of the global software market for Windows. There is indeed a complex problem to be solved of how to organize an open platform so that the development costs are paid, but it's not fundamentally a question of resources. Multiple companies and open source teams have achieved roughly similar feats with many orders of magnitude less resources than what MS rent-extracted from the Windows OS consumers. I was talking about Windows Phone, a mobile operating system. To have an open platform, you have to have one big company paying and managing its development. Otherwise you end up with fragmentation, lack of ABI stability, backwards incompatibilities and "distros" like with Linux on the desktop, and that is not exactly a consumer success. If you want an open platform, you have Android. But apart Huawei (which was forced by US government) and maybe some few small manufacturers from China, I don't see much competition in the space. Contrast this with a parallel world in which we have Android, iOS, Windows Phone, WebOS, Bada, Tizen, Maemo, BlackBerry etc.

DeathArrow 4y ago

> The development costs for Windows (as a common platform, stripped of any add-on that could be provided by other competitive players) are a footnote in the costs of the global software market for Windows. There is indeed a complex problem to be solved of how to organize an open platform so that the development costs are paid, but it's not fundamentally a question of resources. Multiple companies and open source teams have achieved roughly similar feats with many orders of magnitude less resources than what MS rent-extracted from the Windows OS consumers. I was talking about Windows Phone, a mobile operating system. To have an open platform, you have to have one big company paying and managing its development. Otherwise you end up with fragmentation, lack of ABI stability, backwards incompatibilities and "distros" like with Linux on the desktop, and that is not exactly a consumer success. If you want an open platform, you have Android. But apart Huawei (which was forced by US government) and maybe some few small manufacturers from China, I don't see much competition in the space. Contrast this with a parallel world in which we have Android, iOS, Windows Phone, WebOS, Bada, Tizen, Maemo, BlackBerry etc.