David Schwartz wrote: > "Eike Preuss" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > >>> Right, except that's utterly absurd. If every vendor takes their tiny >>>cut of the 95%, a huge cut of the 5% is starting to look *REALLY* good. > > >>Sure, that would be true if the market would be / would have been really >>global. In practice if you have a shop you have a limited 'region of >>influence'. Optimally you are the only shop in this region that sells >>the stuff, or perhaps there are a few shops that compete with you. Lets >>say in your region are two shops competing with you, and you must decide >>wether to sell product A (95%) or B (5%), but you may not sell both. >>Decision 1: Sell A, share the 95% of the local market with two -> about >>32% of the local market for all of you, if all perform equally good >>Decision 2: Sell B -> you get the 5% of the market, the others 47% each >> >>This calculation is probably still a very bad approximation of the >>truth, but things are definitely not as easy as you state them. > > > It depends upon how different the products are and how easy it is to > shop out of your local market. If the products are equally good and > reasonably interchangeable and it's hard to shop out of your local market, > then you're right. The more the smaller product is better than the larger > product, the less interchangeable they are, and the easier it is to shop out > of your local market, the more wrong you are. > > How often do you hear, "I'd like to use Linux, but I just can't get > ahold of it"? > > And how many people do you hear saying, "I'd like to use Linux, but I'm > not willing to shell out the bucks to buy it since I already bought Windows > with my computer". > > On the other hand, where you might be right is in the possibility that > Microsoft's lock on the market prevented other companies from making > operating systems at all. That is, that had Microsoft used different > policies, other companies would have introduced operating systems to compete > with Microsoft, and we'd all have better operating systems for it. If > Microsoft's conduct was legal, this argument establishes that the conduct > was necessary. > > DS > >
Yes, as I said: It is much more complicated than your beautiful argument 'well, then, taking a huge portion of 5% would be much more preferable anyway' suggests. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
