Steve Jobs was nothing, Bill Gates is nothing, Dennis Richie was a god. I, at one time, thought God came to Richie (and his partner Mr. Kernighan) after becoming frustrated with all the screwed up code being written at the time, and wrote C and Unix for these two. Nothing much has occurred to change those thoughts.
Gates and Job's were marketers that ripped off the public. Gates eliminated competition as much as possible and uses his monopoly to gouge the public with >30% profit margins. Jobs rips his customers off with a 40% profit margin. XOM rips us off with a 10% profit margin.
Almost no one knows who Richie and Kernighan are, quite normal for a screwed up society. God must have loved this guy to write his code for him, so I'm sure he is resting in peace. Gates and Jobs on the other hand...
As a young computer science enthusiast I had my copy of K&R always available whenever I was doing procedural code. At first object code still had chunks of C and other procedural code in in but eventually object code made K&R irrelevant.
As far as your hate on Gates and Jobs, please stop using all computer technologies now or consider yourself a complete hypocrite. And don't go calling me on your iPhone and ranting either or send me any mail from your Outlook client.
I'm OK with the 10% Exxon-Mobil makes. I get edgy at 40% that Apple makes, but that doesn't bother me too much because I don't think they have a monopoly. I'm not OK with a 30% profit that a monopoly (90+% of the DT market) makes, particularly when the product stinks.
A perfect example of why monopolies are bad business.
Personally, I don't like having the choice to buy any color of car, as long as it's black.
I don't have a problem with 40% if they can get it. We have the option of saying "NO" and not using the product. After all, while it is a nice product, we lived on earth for thousands of years without any type of phone.
Most monopolies are temporary. If they are hugely profitable, competition soon goes for a share of the market and they usually go for it at a lower price.
Perhaps, depending on your definition of temporary. Microsoft has been at it of a quarter century. Standard Oil, IBM, AT&T had to be broken up by the courts. The reason monopolies like MS are bad is by definition, competition is excluded via control of the market. When competition is stifled by a monopoly, progress stops, quality stagnates and people are forced to pay what the monopoly says they will pay. MS is a perfect example of this, providing crap at a 30% mark up to over 90% of the market.
Just when do you think this "temporary" control will end?
Apple may or may not have a great product, I don't own or use anything of theirs, but my son has a Mac and an iPhone, and he likes them, and the mac runs on a Unix kernel so it should be solid. I'm not sure how they manage a 40% profit margin but I'm not a big fan of companies making that much of a profit margin. As you say, in this case, it may be temporary, who knows. I doubt Apple can put a retailer out of the computer business if they sell a competitors product, like MS could when obtaining monopoly status.
I suspect the few people willing to swim up stream against the MS monopoly are willing to pay exorbitant prices, so even Apple customers are a casualty if the MS monopoly.
of a quarter century. Standard Oil, IBM, AT&T had to be broken up by the courts. The reason monopolies like MS are bad is by definition, competition is excluded via control of the market. When competition is stifled by a monopoly, progress stops, quality stagnates and people are forced to pay what the monopoly says they will pay. MS is a perfect example of this, providing crap at a 30% mark up to over 90% of the market.
Now let us inspect Reality to demonstrate why this is complete nonsense. At the beginning of the desktop/PC revolution, there were two significant OS players: Apple and Radio Shack (there were something like a half dozen TRS-DOS variants, the best of which was LDOS). Then IBM entered the market and Microsoft came with them, for the first time producing an OS.
Now let's fast forward. There are dozens of OS variants. Besides MacOS (a FreeBSD/MACH derivative) and Windows, there are a bunch of different Linux distros, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeDOS, at least one Windows clone OS (whose name I cannot recall). In the mobile device space, Microsoft's presence is too small to matter with Apple IOS and Android (another Linux derivative) splitting the market between them. Microsoft has no presence to speak of in the realtime/embedded space. They are not a force in supercomputer or high-availability clustering. They do not have a place in the multi-petabyte database space.
But you think they're a "monopoly". You are seriously disconnected from the current state of this business. It is a simple, demonstrable, and completely rational observation that Microsoft dominates only the desktop, and then only so long as they provide a good value. More and more people are turning to portable devices like high function phones and tablets - a space where Microsoft has almost NO presence. This, sir, is not a monopoly. This is a market with more product, more players, and more competition than has ever existed since the dawn of commercial computing. The fact that Microsoft knows how to prosper and maintain high margins in this environment is to their credit.
P.S. Microsoft isn't as bulletproof as you seem to think. Go look at their stock performance over the last decade.
P.P.S. The only "predatory monopoly" that exists in our nation is the government and that's because they get to use force to keep themselves in power. Fortunately - for the most part - that use of force is narrowly bounded by rule of law.
Um, IBM was not broken up by the courts. There was a consent decree in '56, and they lost a suit to CDC, and a few others, in the '70s, but there was no breakup by the government.
...and just what 90% of the market wants.
If I knew, I'd be as rich as WGates. ;-)
A 40% margin isn't unusual for a high-tech business. It takes huge sums of money to stay on the bleeding edge. That's just the way it is.
Not even close. m II's ship is still logging miles on this traffic.
-- Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships, that is why good ideas are always initially resisted. Good ideas come with a heavy burden. Which is why so few people have them. So few people can handle it. -- Hugh Macleod
Well, you certainly haven't demonstrated with this half baked reply. Lets "inspect" to see why you are off base.
These were meaningless. When IBM decided to enter the PC/DT market, who they picked to provide the OS determined who would ride the DC/PC revolution. The only thing stopping them from doing it themselves was fear of another anti-trust suit. They picked Gates, not because he had an OS to sell, but because the CEO or President of IBM, I don't recall which, was friends with Gates mother. Gates had to go out and find a workable OS, and he bought DOS from Patterson, for $100 grand. Gates eventually hired Patterson, because Gates and friends couldn't figure out how DOS even worked, and seems they never did, from the garbage they put out. Hard to imagine a company like IBM signing a contract with someone that had nothing to sell, but that's exactly what they did.
Then IBM entered the market
Until IBM entered the market, the market was bare.
Lets not. From the beginning, there was little competition, since IBM, for whatever reason, chose MS. That meant that if you wanted to write software, sell software, or have anything to do with PC's, you had to go with MS because that was the platform IBM used. Those that attempted to get a foot in the door of any retail outlet was quickly stomped on by MS threatening the retailer to either withdraw their license to sell MS or with super high price for the product. Since IBM had set the stage for MS, if a retailer ignored MS threats, they were doomed, so they didn't, and no "feet" got in the door. All other products were like farts in the wind, had no chance, mattered not if they were good, bad or indifferent. They eventually all went away, which is exactly what monopolies do to the competition. Even if you think you know more than judge Sporkin, who listened to years of testimony laying out how MS violated anti-trust laws, and found them super guilty of violating anti trust laws, you cannot deny that controlling over 90% of the DT market is a monopoly. Well you can, but then you would be spouting nonsense.
There are dozens of OS variants. Besides MacOS
No DT product could get a foot in the door "in the early days" of the DT PC. MS made sure of it, and it was proven in court after the fact in 1995.
No shit Dick Tracy. I never said they dominated the mainframe market, or the cell phone market, or the meat market. They dominate over 90% of the DT market, they have a lousy product that is only "good enough" because the average consumer has little choice when shopping the DT market.
Microsoft has a monopoly on the PC DT market. We'll see how the cell phone market pans out.
Microsoft has over a 90% market share in the DT PC market. You can say that's not a monopoly all day long, you will be wrong.
This is a market with more product, more players, and more
Standard Oil, IBM, AT&T also knew how to prosper but they didn't make
30% profit. They were broken up because they had monopolies and either were not as corrupt as MS or Government was not as corrupt in their day, or some combination of both.
Get real. Their profit margin has always been super high, what one would expect from a monopoly. They have been "bulletproof" for around 25 years, what happens in the future is a guess, the past is undeniable. They were able to maintain this control by stopping retailers from selling competing products and by changing the environment so software, often even their own, would not work between upgrades. This was deliberate to control the market, and it worked.
Unfortunately, the "rule of law" went out the window when MS got busted for anti-trust violations and all they got was a slap on the hands, and a dire need to contribute vast donations to those in charge of the "rule of law". The current regime is even worse, and thinks the "rule of law" is for you, not them.
True, they were found in violation of the Sherman Antitrust act, in court. My guess is that had them on pins and needles when they opened the PC/DT market.
And you know this how? Because the market is controlled by one company doesn't mean 90% of the market wants it, it could (and does) mean that
90% has no choice but to "like" what they get. Same as you can buy any color car you want, as long as it's black.
Funny, but they have already controlled 90% of the DT market for about
25 years. In the computer age that changes minute by minute, that is a hell of a long "temporary". Any company that had monopoly control of
90% of a market for this long is missing competition, particularly if profit margins are significantly high. This is why we are stuck with the worlds worst OS, like it or not.
Well, IBM is a high tech business and it's profit margin is high, usually below 10% or so. Intel averages around 17%. EXXON-Mobil has under 10% and our socialist democrats want to slap a windfall profit tax on them... MS is 30%, Apple 40% and everyone seems to get misty eyed around those two.
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