And lo on Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:44:31 -0000, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> did  
spake, saying:

> scott wrote:
>>> If M$ made a quality product and charged a lot of money for it, I  
>>> wouldn't have a problem with that.
>>  The MS shareholders would though, because they wouldn't make as much  
>> profit. It's the same as if Ford suddenly decided all cars were going  
>> to be made to Rolls-Royce standards - not exactly a smart business move.
>
> No - but selling cars which you know are going to crash at least once  
> every 52 days... well, if a company tried to do that, they'd be shut  
> down.

No it's subject to the same cost/benefit analysis. If I save $50m from not  
installing some widget and worst case scenario is the company paying total  
damages of $25m if 'found out' then you don't install the widget. If  
people die because of that, then people die.

> However, for software it seems it's OK to sell a malfunctioning product.

It's not legal to sell any malfuntioning product, however you first have  
to define malfunction.

>>> What I have a problem with is the fact that they charge a fortune for  
>>> very low-quality products, and get away with it.
>>  Last time I checked, a company was free to sell their products for  
>> whatever price they wanted to.  If they try to sell them too high,  
>> nobody will buy them.

Unless they're a utility company their prices have to be checked with the  
regulators.

> Well, sure, if there were an alternative, people would run out and buy  
> that in their droves. I'm sure M$ would radically rethink their strategy  
> if that happened. But it won't.

At which point we recognise the free market system in action when it comes  
to monopolies, the company in question doesn't have to create a better  
product then their competitors simply a product not bad enough to  
encourage people to turn away from it.

>>> And they get away with it precisely because of the underhanded  
>>> techniques they use to eliminate all competition.
>>  Never seen any real competition for Windows.
>
> Perhaps not. (Does NetWare count? I don't really know much about it.)

and yet prior to Windows 95 there were quite the number of competing OSs.

> But what about, say, Word? There's quite a few other word processors out  
> there - and in past times there were even more. And most of them were a  
> lot more reliable than Word...

See above re monopolies. You buy the Microsoft word processor to go on the  
Microsoft operating system because it's obviously going to work better.  
Home users will use it as that's what they're used to and then you throw  
copies at the educators so that the next generation is brought up using it.

>> Linux is certainly getting a lot better, if they could get people to  
>> release games for it (like they do for xbox/ps3/pc) then they'd be a  
>> strong competitor I think.  Not used Apples much, but again lack of  
>> games prevents me from looking seriously at it.
>
> Apple requires you to buy new hardware, so it's not purely a software  
> decision.

Yet everyone loves their monopolistic ways :-)

> Linux is nice, but... well, it's fundamentally designed for UNIX nerds.  
> So if you're not, good luck... Besides, I'm not convinced that the whole  
> UNIX design is particularly coherant. (E.g., autoconf exists.)

However as has been pointed out here GNU/Linux has been set up for  
non-nerds, the difficulty lies in good old inertia -

So you've got your computer and it's come with Windows pre-installed  
here's another operating system, you've never used it before and it may  
really screw your hard drive up do you want to use it, do you?

So you're buying your computer and you can choose between Windows which  
you've heard of and every program/game you see is designed for, or you can  
choose something you've kind of vaguely heard of before. Hey why not go  
for the dual-boot option and just waste a ton of space on your hard drive?

At least we've LiveCDs now that helps so much.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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