5 ms·
Today's XKCD: Microsoft
- pif 14y agoAs 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?
- soapdog 14y agoApple doesn't allow third party browsers using their own renderers in their iOS devices.
- bruceboughton 14y agoThey don't have a monopoly to abuse.
- antninja 14y agoThey have a local monopoly on their hardware. It's like cable companies: there may be several of them in a country but if there's only one in each city, they have a local monopoly that they can abuse.
- randomdata 14y agoMy third-party iOS browser uses its own renderer and they don't seem to have issues with it. However, it is designed for niche cases and does not implement the full W3C spec., so I guess that is what they really have issues with?
- GotAnyMegadeth 14y agoApple using their strength in the phone market to gain an advantage in the maps market?
- jrajav 14y agoWhat advantage do they have in the maps market?
- rmah 14y agoThat is legal for non-monopolies.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoAre legality and morality interchangeable?
- lttlrck 14y agoIs morality a foundation of capitalism?
- chris_wot 14y agoDepends who you ask. Milton Friedman argued that capitalism cannot be seperated from freedom as "[e]conomic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society. On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom." [1] On the other hand, Karl Marx saw capitalism as dividing society into the haves and have nots - the haves being the bourgouise with all the wealth, and the have nots being the proleteriat who had none of the wealth. Marx, obviously, was not a fan. 1. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ipe/friedman.htm https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ipe/friedman.htm
- InclinedPlane 14y agoThe XKCD strip is about whether or not it's a good thing to have tech companies with overwhelming amounts of power in certain areas. That's orthogonal to whether or not such behavior is strictly legal.
- subsystem 14y ago"[...] their strength in the X market to gain an advantage in the Y market." Isn't that pretty much Google's business plan?
- streptomycin 14y agoExcept Google doesn't have any monopolies, so it's legal.
- sjwright 14y agoMaybe, but that goes to show the definition of monopoly is hazy at the best of times.
- streptomycin 14y agoIt's hazy at the worst of times. At the best of times, it's very obvious, like Microsoft in the late 90s.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoIt'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 development trouble. Even without the bundling Netscape was at a huge disadvantage. More so, the truly anti-competitive behavior of Microsoft (where they effectively bribed OEMs to prevent them using other OSes) didn't receive nearly as much attention.
- streptomycin 14y agoThere 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_reach_antitrust_settlement http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/84708/Microsoft_Be_re... likely because Be was near dead by that point.
- LarrySDonald 14y agoI remember thinking that was strange. How do you settle an antitrust lawsuit out of court? Ask every consumer ever to agree that 10c is fair for having been prevented from having the option of saying "No OS or GPL OS please, I'll sort it out myself when I get home"? I don't recall getting one red cent, even though I was sold hardware through several vendors who had been bribed to not offer me options. While I'm sure many consumers would still have said "No, I need things installed" I can also see many saying "Nah, I'm not forking up for an OS, I'll run GPL" or "Nah, I'll... No. (pirated CD at the ready back home)". 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..
- HarshaThota 14y agoWasn't Google accused of forcing Motorola/Verizon to dump SkyHook in favor of their own solution by holding Android hostage? I am not sure what the result was but it seems one could say that's anti-competitive behavior (if the accusations are true) but it probably didn't matter because they didn't have a monopoly at the time.
- conroe64 14y agoHere is an older example. Apple used to use the popularity of their iPod to get people to use iTunes to buy music. They were very aggressive at preventing people from making compatible drivers. People would try to do so to make the iPod compatible with Linux only to have Apple slightly change the protocol every month with a new iPod OS release. I don't know why their was no outcry over this.
- daliusd 14y agoNow I see why companies mentioned in hover text have minor problems in Europe: Fac€book, Googl€, Appl€...
- chrisdroukas 14y agoAnd Fa¢ebook doesn't have the same impact.
- sjwright 14y agoMaybe, but they are making their money through billions of tiny transactions (advertising) so perhaps it's apt.
- manveru 14y ago¥ahoo! Japan on the other hand does fine in Japan.
- streptomycin 14y agoThis 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/ http://xkcd.com/774/ - it's trendy to ignore the abuses of Microsoft in the 90s, or to paint some false equivalency that allows you to just ignore stuff.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoLet'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 competitors. And thank goodness that they promote an open platform where anyone can run whatever software they want. Edit: the 95% figure is a bit out of date, however Apple's revenue marketshare in tablets still remains quite high (around 90% in 2011 and even in 2012). Edit #2: For reference, when Standard Oil was brought to court on anti-trust charges they had a 70% market share. And US Steel in its heydey only controlled 2/3 of the market.
- streptomycin 14y ago95% market share? Where are you getting that from? This says 65%: http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/14/ipad-market-share-all-time-high/ http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/14/ipad-market-share-all-time-hig... This says 52%: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2012/10/02/android-could-soon-overtake-apple-in-tablet-market/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2012/10/02/android-co... Try again? Also, even if it was 95%, there are clearly competitors with momentum, and you could probably argue that the tablet market isn't really distinct from the smartphone market. But really, it seems like it's way less than 95%. No monopoly.
- heyitsnick 14y ago
- chrismorgan 14y agoHooray for Mozilla! Fighting the fight again, this time against a competitor that wouldn't even have been there but for Mozilla's success. [To be more explicit: that is WebKit on mobile devices.]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- adjwilli 14y agoWhy does everyone think this is about Apple? It's possible the comic is referring to Google's monopoly of web searches. My guess would be he's criticizing "monopoly as dangerous" accusations in general as silly since Microsoft has fallen so far. But that's kind of a poor argument since Microsoft was punished for monopolistic practices, both de jure and de facto. This really isn't XKCD's best comic and it's not even funny.
- Digit-Al 14y agoThe "alt" text reads: Facebook, Apple, and Google all got away with their monopolist power grabs because they don't have any 'S's in their names for critics to snarkily replace with '$'s. So it is partially about Apple.
- chj 14y agoComparing to what Apple is doing right now and what MS is going to do with their WinRT, bundling browser is nothing.
- nullsub 14y agothe discussion here is weird. isn't this obviously about the across-the-board practice of bundling browsers with OSes, which is the rule in mobile OS and is culminating in Chrome OS?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- DonnyV 14y agoAt the time it made sense to go after Microsoft for bundling because the PC was the only gateway to the internet. Now almost every device has access to the internet, so its a much even playing field.