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Steven_A_S wrote:

vita10gy wrote:

Think of the "monopoly" the big auto companies have on deciding what stereos go in cars. Think of the boom of sales the poor after market car stereo industry would get if only the government would step in and force automakers to ship their cars with no audio system preinstalled!

I don't think you really understand what the problem is.  The term monopoly doesn't mean that a company is only putting one product into their own product.  It means that one company dominates a certain market.   The auto companies don't have a monopoly.  There is no one company that has enough of a significant lead over all the others that it could be considered a monopoly.

Microsoft has a monopoly on OSes for the PC (yes, Linux is a PC OS, but we're talking about average home computers, and the average user wouldn't use Linux due to level of complexity).  Microsoft's monopoly status has been judged to be fact.  But it's not the monopoly itself that Microsoft is in trouble for.  The problem is they've leveraged the monopoly to build monopolies in other areas (web browsers, office suites).  This anticompetitive business practice is considered illegal, and has been found to be so in court (see http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm for more detail).  The fact of the matter is that it's because they are a monopoly that they have to watch what they add.

You go try to start up a car company and let us know how easy it is to get a piece of that pie. I hear that Tucker guy has some good luck. Oligopolies aren't that big of improvement on monopolies.

And I never said they weren't a monopoly, and I never defended their actions, stop reading between the lines.

Last edited by vita10gy (2007-06-13 12:27:15)

I can only get vauxhall parts to fit my vauxhall astra, fiat don't make parts for my car

That's not anti-competitive, nor is it a monopoly.

I think we should all be thankful that software companies have been able to make applications for  a system they didn't develop.

But we got used to that, then MS decide to alter things.

Rights and consequences are different things - MS has every right to prevent 3rd party software from running on their systems, but the consequences of them doing that.....?

Last edited by Northie (2007-06-14 07:15:02)