Why aren't computer clocks as accurate as cheap quartz watches?

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accurate as cheap quartz watches?]

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properly

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By the way, do you think Microsoft Office is one application?

That's so silly, just like your justification for dodging the Microsoft Windows monopoly question.

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accurate as cheap quartz watches?]

Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)

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Given your persistent single level quoting only, the context of your argument is anybody's guess, but if you're talking about the time Microsoft Windows succeeded over IBM's OS/2, Microsoft won the battle by virtue of having all of the APIs from Windows 3.1 to use with Windows 95, and the huge base of applications to go with it.

Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2005 04:28:47 +0100

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properly

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...

But seriously. Microsoft was known to hold monopoly power over the personal computer operating system market long before our courts finalized the issue. Given our current state of justice, it might be a moot point, but it's crystal clear to the vast majority of techies who don't work for Microsoft.

From the federal district court of the United States.

"Microsoft possesses monopoly power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems."

From the federal appeals court of the United States.

"... we uphold the District Court's finding of monopoly power in its entirety."

You must be wearing some heavy duty blinders.

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accurate as cheap quartz watches?]

Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)

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Well, I agree it's silly of you to keep hounding me.

Declining to discuss it with you does not suggest any particular opinion on the subject regardless of your idiotic attempts to imply otherwise.

The courts didn't finalize anything, except in a restricted legal sense, and there was no general consensus on such questions before or after the courts gave their opinions.

Few people dispute that Microsoft has a dominant position in a handful of key markets, most notably in PC desktop operating systems. Whether or not this is a monopoly or a harmful monopoly is a much more open question.

Intel has a comparable market share (currently around 81%, vs. 94% for Microsoft in the desktop OS arena), and yet it does not appear to raise so many questions of monopoly. I think in part that is because the average geek cannot fancy himself building a chip fabrication facility and competing with Intel, whereas many geeks like to imagine building a software product that somehow competes with Microsoft. And many more geeks would like to work for Microsoft, which is more willing to hire people with no education. Chips don't engender the same emotions and envy, in any case.

-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

Yeah. Bad development process.

The point is it depends on whether the 'upgrade' offers significant enough functional improvement.

Well, pencil and paper 'does the job' too but a text processor does it better, and a WYSIWYG word processor does it even better, depending on how one defines 'better'.

"Does the job" is an insufficient description because everyone is managing to 'do the job' with what they have till something better comes along and, interestingly enough, it isn't always clear just how much 'better' something is till it's used.

Well, some people still have no computer at all and I'm building a tube amplifier. Neither says much about the state of the broader market, or people in general, as they're fringe/niche situations.

That's true of any technological progression.

You're assuming there just isn't anything 'left to do' that can matter and I'm not willing to make that assumption.

So? There are things for which you don't 'need' a computer at all but that doesn't mean no one needs computers.

You're losing track of the issue here, which was whether an O.S. 'upgrade' can offer a significant enough improvement to warrant the 'upgrade', not whether every last soul on the planet uses it. And I was pointing out that the O.S. changes needed to take advantage of 32 bit technology, vs 16 bit technology, was a significant enough performance increase.

I presume the 'they' you speak of is the last group because the others discovered they 'needed' it after it was available.

Perhaps, but they're still selling a ton of them.

Yeah, and a very interesting story.

OS/2 could have supported Windows applications, but it didn't (at least not completely and well).

In those days Microsoft was the underdog, and the angry young males were rooting for it instead of IBM. It's amusing to see how history is now being revised so that the currently dominant player can be portrayed as the bad guy even back then. We're not at war with Eastasia, we're at war with Eurasia.

-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

You need to be careful about the word 'monopoly' because the court's ruli= ng=20 is routinely misstated. The court did not find that Microsoft was "a=20 monopoly" but that they "held monopoly power." They're not the same thing= =20 and neither, in and of themselves alone, mean anything devious or illegal= =20 took place.

Most people have a decent enough grasp of what a "monopoly" is but "holds= =20 monopoly power" is a legal term of art that, in colloquial terms, is akin= =20 to your comment that Microsoft has a dominate market position.

Technically, 'monopoly power' is the ability to control price and/or=20 exclude competition but you need not even do it, simply being 'able' to i= s=20 enough, and the courts often interpret 'control' to an easier=20 'significantly influence' and 'exclude' to 'significantly inhibit'.

"Monopoly Power" is not tied to market share although the courts often us= e=20 it as an 'indicator' anyway.

To make matters even more confusing, 'harsh' business practices, even by =

someone holding monopoly power, is not necessarily an anti-trust violatio= n=20 as the appeals court ruling in Intergraph Corporation v. Intel Corp., 195= =20 F.3d 1346 (Fed. Cir. 1999) stated: "the Sherman Act does not convert all =

harsh commercial actions into antitrust violations. Unilateral conduct th= at=20 may adversely affect another=92s business situation, but is not intended = to=20 monopolize that business, does not violate the Sherman Act."

The Netscape matter is interesting because they began by giving their=20 browser away then, when they had 84% market share, began charging for it,= =20 which would seem to be an exercise in monopolistic power... but maybe no =

one sued. Then, when Microsoft gives away their browser, Netscape brings =

suit against Microsoft for doing the same thing they had done to get an 8=

Amusing, eh?

Well, they did, in fact, eventually tout that OS/2 would 'run Windows software' which, in market terms, is tantamount to declaring Windows 'the standard'. And then one asks, why not just get 'the real thing'?

IBM completely misjudged the market and what 'the competition' was. It wasn't 'windows', it was MS Office. People didn't give a rat's behind what the O.S. was, they wanted Office to work and it ran on Windows so, you get Windows.

Which is why OS/2 fans can scream all they want about how OS/2 was 'technically superior' because the only 'technical' thing that really mattered to the market was how well MS Office ran.

Now, if IBM had teamed up with Wordperfect, back when Wordperfect was still the defacto PC word processing standard, and developed a GUI version along with OS/2 they might have been able to successfully compete in that arena.

Yes, but those major leaps in functionality are mostly history now. These days, the improvements usually involve multicolored transparent menus, or larger and fancier 3-D icons, or other bells and whistles that consume hardware and software resources but contribute nothing to the basic purpose of the computer, for the average user.

The broader market (and especially the worldwide market) is only slightly beyond DOS today.

There may be plenty left to do; the problem is that nobody is doing it. Software companies tend to content themselves with adding useless bells and whistles--software bloat--to their products with each upgrade, because adding truly new features and functionality requires a lot of expensive development and involves taking serious risks. The idea is to milk existing business for all the money one can, so companies are unwilling to take risks with novelty. The bigger the company, the more true this becomes.

Maybe. So what next? To justify an upgrade, I need something truly interesting, and I just don't see that happening. The last upgrade I found _interesting_ was from Windows 3.x to Windows NT (I never bothered with Windows 95 and its ilk).

-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

Netscape wasn't seen as the bad guy; Microsoft was. The difference between subjective perception and reality is sometimes enormous.

-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

Yup. I tell Linux users the same thing. And a lot of the older Linux users were OS/2 fanatics before Linux came along. They can't _both_ be "the best operating system ever written."

-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

Hehe. Well, one could argue that OS/2 was "the best operating system ever written" as of 1995 and Linux is "the best operating system ever written" as of 2005 ;)

But the thing that confounds the 'technically superior' crowd is that 'ignorant users' don't give a whit about 'technical superiority', they just want, as you put it, to get the job done (with the least pain, misery, and cost). Now, if the 'technically superior' crowd could explain why the nuances of intertask messaging and 'a real multitasking O.S.' (sic) will make the spell checker more brilliant then they might have a recognizable argument but, otherwise, it's just meaningless techno babble to the average user.

What can it do? It can run your Windows software too. Yeah? Well, so can Windows.

Its hard to sell that.

You betcha. So much for 'blind' justice ;)

It gets even more interesting when you look at the 'ICON on the desktop' issue. One could always install Netscape on a Windows machine, and sell it that way, but what Netscape wanted was for OEMs, with, one imagines, a bit of prodding from Netscape, the holder of monopoly power in the browser market, to be able to *remove* I.E. from Microsoft's own product, not simply coexist, and sell it with Netscape *only*.

One way of looking at it might be to say that Netscape was complaining about Microsoft 'infringing' on their 'free use of monopoly power' ;)

Your life must be constant bliss.

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I'm hounding you? For an opinion? On USENET?

That's funny too.

Do you think Microsoft Office is one application? I'm impressed that anybody (who is supposed to be high technology oriented) can muster the courage to say something like that in public. And I'm looking forward to you all plainly stating your (comedic) belief that Microsoft does not hold monopoly power. I don't mean BillW50, he is way past comedy.

That baseball bat analogy (in a prior post) was posed by one of the appeals court judges when Microsoft plainly argued that because because it is the rightful owner of Windows, it has the right to do anything with Windows.

Some Microsoft defender arguments are pretty funny, even arguments put forth by extremely well-paid attorneys in federal court.

Microsoft is in court every day forcing its will upon smaller software publishers. One year, Microsoft poured $650 million into our justice system. Microsoft constantly employs our government to physically force smaller software companies into compliance. If it weren't for our intellectual property law and our government to physically enforce that law at the point of a gun, Microsoft would fall apart like a playing card house.

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Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)

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That's probably the closest thing to an accurate summary I've ever seen come out of you and this may come as a real shock but I am under no 'obligation' whatsoever to provide you with an opinion on ANYthing.