Re: [PLUG] MS Outlaws?

["Arthur S. Alexion" <arthur@alexion.com>]

Monopolies are like horseshoes and hand grenades.  You can do a lot of 
damage, just by getting close.

Its not an absolute thing.  Courts look to two things: (1) do you so 
dominate a market that you can distort it by manipulating supply and demand 
and (2) have you used that power over the market to impede competition?

Note that "dominate" does not mean that you are the only player, it just 
means that you can act like it.  Note also that "impede" competition does 
not mean that competition does not theoretically exist, it just means that 
you can prevent *meaningful* competition.

It is not about absolutes.

Art



At 08:11 PM 2/17/2002 -0500, Jon Galt wrote:
> Well I'm probably going to astound some people here by claiming that the
> arguments below do not prove that Microsoft violated any law.  I'm not
> arguing with Sam or anybody else here.  I understand that some courts have
> ruled that Microsoft violated some law or other, but I disagree with any
> nutball judge, who probably doesn't know his ass from a parallel port, who
> claims that Microsoft has a monopoly in anything.
>
> This group itself is proof that they don't.  Ever hear of Linux, BSD,
> Solaris?  Ever hear that Apache, on some variant of Unix, is the most
> common web server on the internet?  Ever hear of IBM selling servers that
> run Linux instead of a Microsoft OS?
>
> We all know that Microsoft is not the only maker of operating systems.
> They certainly are NOT the best - they have competition, so they can't, by
> definition, have a monopoly in operating systems.  Do they have a monopoly
> in anything else?  I don't think so.
>
> Wayne


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Art Alexion                                 mailto:arthur@alexion.com
Arthur S. Alexion LLC                          http://www.alexion.com
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