On 9/21/07, jon louis mann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > i assume you are a capitalist? if you ran a highly profitable business > that you had invested all your borrowed capital in, and had to retool > because someone had a better way, would you quietly go bankrupt if > there was a way you could buy out the other guy. isn't that what bill > gates does?
No, I don't think so. Bill Gates is extraordinarily good at packaging technology. He has an excellent sense of the design, features, quality, pricing and market positioning necessary to maiximize market share. The money follows. I'm not saying that Microsoft's products have the best features or quality possible. Obviously they don't. But starting with Bill himself, the company has done better than anybody else at combining those aspects in a way that people will buy in large quantities. Steve Jobs and Apple, by comparison, excel at design, which gets more respect in academic, artistic and intellectual circles. I've often compared Microsoft with the Aldine Press. Aldus republished others creations -- the classics -- and created the world's first great publishing house. His innovations were in packaging -- the quarto and octavo. Meanwhile (or somewhat before, IIRC), Gutenberg died bankrupt after his investors lost patience with his endless tinkering to make his inventions perfect. Aldus' product quality wasn't so great; the errata pages eventually became longer than the original text (sound like a Windows service pack?). You could say that Aldus "stole" the great works. You could probably argue that he was stifling innovation by ignoring contemporary writers. But you could also say that Aldus' great achievement was to bring together technologists, academics and designers to work as a real team. And I think that's exactly what Microsoft has done. If more technology companies figured that out, we'd have an even stronger technology industry. The problems I see with Microsoft have nothing to do with the sort of behavior you allege. They really are problems with capitalism itself -- a feedback-based market can't self-regulate goods and services that violate the law of diminishing returns, a/k/a network effects. Nick -- Nick Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED] Messages: 408-904-7198 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
