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I suspect we're overestimating how much end-consumer desire there was for alternatives. Removing the choice of O/S might well have made buying a computer possib
by ArkyBeagle 12y ago
I suspect we're overestimating how much end-consumer desire there was for alternatives. Removing the choice of O/S might well have made buying a computer possible ( in terms of internal bandwidth ) for some.
Antitrust arguments famously switch between "harm to competitors" and "harm to consumers" while the empirical case is that with very few exceptions, these are nothing like the same thing.
At least in the '90s, when this really was a thing, people just wanted to go to Best Buy, plonk down their $2k and get on that AOL thingy all the people at work are talking about.
Now? Has anything been more proprietary and closed than iOS? Seems to be perceived as a virtue. When I am among the iOS people, they have trouble with 'em all the time.
- ocdtrekkie 12y agoHarm to competitors is most definitely harm to consumers.
- ArkyBeagle 12y agoSo goes the theory. There are a great many problems with monopolies, but consumer pain doesn't seem to much be one of them. The econometrics guys say it's not that simple. One of my go to pieces on this is by Stigler here: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Monopoly.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Monopoly.html
- azakai 12y agoHarm to competitors literally means less competition in the market for producing good products for consumers. In the worst case, that means you depend on a single monopoly corporation to produce the best possible product. It is almost a given that that results in lower-quality products for consumers. Although it might be hard to prove using examples - as the better products that would have existed simply never appear in the first place. It isn't that competitors fail, although that happens too. It is that it is irrational for competitors to even try to spend money on products to compete against a monopoly that will crush them.