Coyote Blog

Excellent column. I only wish we could unleash the same type of entrepreneurial spirit today. However, between high taxes and never ending regulations even Rockfeller might be daunted.

If Obama and Co. had been in charge back then, the government would have bailed out the whaling fleet to save all those union jobs.

Gee, and there's no other reason to hunt whales? Shame it didn't work for the Passenger Pigeon. Though I doubt few AMerican would like to drenched in pigeon poop. Then again how many believe that people are free to hunt whatever unowned animals they like and Greenies have no right to intervene.

"Gee, and there’s no other reason to hunt whales?"

Sure there are. Eliminating one of them is a good thing, no?

"Shame it didn’t work for the Passenger Pigeon."

I imagine it might have, had they been hunted for their oil.

"Though I doubt few AMerican would like to drenched in pigeon poop."

Hard to argue with that.

"Then again how many believe that people are free to hunt whatever unowned animals they like and Greenies have no right to intervene."

Careful now- you're just about to make an argument in favor of property rights. Are you *sure* that's what you want to do?

"The Passenger Pigeon was hunted for food and went extinct because they were cheap and easy to kill but were slow breeders."

Which is why I said if they had been hunted for oil instead, they might have had a better chance at survival.

"After all, if oil was the only reason to hunt whales then whaling would have disspated well in the very early 20th century..."

I don't think anyone has suggested (at least, I haven't, anyway) that there was only one reason for hunting whales.

Microsoft is not now and has never been a monopoly. So what's to break up?

Not sure:

A lot of whales are alive to today because of international agreement (i.e. government) as many private people would hunt whales tomorrow if given the chance. The Passenger Pigeon was hunted for something more important than oil: food. However there's the point of whether governments have a right to regulate the commons especially as whale hunter would be homesteading the whales they kill.

"There is a documentary ‘The Corporation’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation) whose thesis is that corporations are little different from psychopaths."

Someone who styles his name after a government of psychopaths perhaps ought to go back to wikipedia and look up "projection".

However, it is true - large organizations are psychopathic. Corporation, government, non-profit, or church, if they become big enough they will find it necessary to absolve their officers and operatives of individual responsibility, and thereby of conscience. But solving the problem of conscienceless corporations by giving conscienceless governments more power to control how people associate with each other is simply insane.

Regardless of what some government official ruled in the court case (unless you ignore the actual meaning of the word and substitute something different), Microsoft was not (and is not) a monopoly. Two words- "Apple" and "Linux". There are almost certainly others.

"My strong opinion, which may differ from yours, is that large corporations are just as dangerous to our freedom as large government."

You need to think about this a little more. Government is indeed dangerous to our freedom because they have a monopololy on the use of force in order to make you do what they want you to. Corporations, on the other hand, do not have this power.

As much as Microsoft might want to, they cannot force you to buy their product or prevent you from developing your own computer operating system without resorting to the use of government to enforce their desires.

Funny how Microsoft's problems started after it was hit up for a big campaign contribution by the DNC to help put Clinton in office and Gates told them to "buzz off".

> Microsoft is not now and has never been a monopoly. So what’s to break up?

Yeah, that's how they killed Netscape, Gates just said, "Hey, guys, we want to beat you in the browser market. Do you mind?"

And the people at NS said, "Hey, Bill, sure -- no problem!"

No, M$ instigated a wide array of anti-competitive measures, including defacto paying companies to NOT install the NS browser on new machines, DESPITE the fact that it represented more than 80% of the existing market at the onset of IE, and clearly belonged on everyone's machine as a defacto option -- "Belonged", btw, because IE always lagged behind the alternatives extremely -- IE4 lacked many features common to NS2, released more than 3 years prior to IE4. Likewise, IE6 lacked one of the more obviously beneficial features called "tabbed browsing" -- implemented on NS4, many years prior.

In other words, IE never, ever competed by being "better than the alternative". Nor did it compete on price -- NS was always available for free, just as IE was. Firefox and Opera, both generally superior, have also always been free.

No, IE competed by using dirty tricks to insert inertia into the usage process which it took full advantage of. Most of those dirty tricks tie to M$'s monopolistic practices...

Example -- Microsoft has implemented, in its computer language/development tools, specific protocols -- most of them in direct violation of existing, established programming standards -- which make writing code specifically functional ONLY on IE easier. M$ uses their development tools to force people to use IE and not alternatives.

Example -- In the early days, when M$ was playing "catchup" with NS, they specifically gave a lower price for licensing Windows and/or the Office products, if the company did NOT install NS on their machines from the factory. The end user could add it, as could a reseller -- but a typical user did not bother.

Example -- if you buy a computer from a company that sells Windows machines, you're almost certainly paying, in the price of that machine, for a copy of Windows -- even if you order it WITHOUT Windows at all, including WITH an alternative, such as a Linux implementation -- preinstalled. It is a standard element of M$'s contracts with computer manufacturers that they get a piece of every machine that company sells which it sells AT ALL with Windows on it (servers are often the only exclusion to this rule, since many models are offered without Windows' excreble server products).

If a company wants to sell ANY machines with Windows on it, it must accept this deal. That pretty much NO company can refuse M$ and go with an alternative and stay in business outside of some specialty-niche market says what M$ actually is... a monopoly.
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So trust me. M$ is and has long been a defacto monopoly in the market. As with Standard oil, it almost lost that position by missing the significance of the browser-as-interface.

It's now facing a moderate competition from several other sources, none of which really target the main segment of the market (The Mac targets total neophiles -- both the noob type and the non-technical-mind type. Linux targets the opposite end of the tech spectrum, though it is slowly getting some capacity to give it inroads to the main market segment -- there is currently no substantial competitor for the other 80-90% of the market). The closest thing to that is the variant notions of web-based computing and cloud computing and so forth, which might be able to steal a march on M$, but that has yet to be proven.

I'm very much a free-market man myself. I'd like to see M$ broken up into three or four companies -- each of which has full access to EVERY ONE its existing products and source code, and each of the three of which is free to modify and market its own improvements and variations on that product.

THAT would be a truly competitive, "free" marketplace.

Owning critters bring the risk of being liable for the damage they cause. Not to mention many critters can't be confined to cages.