Guy Incognito
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I am saying that in the specific instance of the Microsoft monopoly. patents were not the cause.
How can you have a monopoly on any sort of software without patents?
How can you have a monopoly on any sort of software without patents?
Microsoft was a price setter, not a price taker in terms of their operating system and MS Office products.
People could have easily chosen other operating systems. They didn't, and they paid the price for it. That's not a monopoly, it sounds more like a fad.
But there would have been much more competition had those patents not been in place.
Those APIs were at the heart of the lawsuit. The simple fact is that microsoft had create secret APIs that it did not publish the specifications to, which made its software superior to run on windows than third party software. This created an unfair advantage for microsoft.
Patents and copyrights never entered the picture, this is more akin to trade secrets actually.
Patents enter into the picture when Microsoft makes its money off of its software. Patents are what make the trade secrets profitable in the first place.
The only other operating system available at the time that would run on consumer grade hardware (meaning, not 40k+ servers or engineering workstations) was OS/2, apple, and something else I can't remember (but it had good graphics for its day), all were a joke for the needs of even a small business network.
At that time, if you wanted to actually use a computer for the benefit of a company, it was a combination of unix (very expensive), netware (servers only), and windows (nt or 9x)
Also software patents didn't even get started until 1994, too late to the party in this particular scenario as well.
The case was filed in 1998. Besides:
"The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted patents that may be referred to as software patents since at least the early 1970s."
Software patent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Without patents, all of those complaints would have been meaningless as competition would have not required all of those things that Microsoft wanted. None of what Microsoft was able to do is possible without patents. And of course, there were still alternatives, but people still chose Microsoft.
For anyone who claims that Microsoft uses software patents as the means of maintaining their monopoly, please show the court cases in which Microsoft sued its competitors in the OS market for patent infringement.
in 1999, microsoft sued tomtom over its version of linux over the use of FAT32 (a method of organizing hard drives). However, this had nothing to do with its monopoly status in the 90s, obviously (I don't think tomtom even existed back then). It was settled out of court, tomtom still uses FAT32 to read SD cards and nothing was accomplished for or against in terms of microsoft's position in the industry and market share.
You would be hard pressed to call Linux a real competitor as a consumer desktop OS back in '99.
Go back and reread my posts on how software works, what the actual problems presented in the 1998 lawsuit were, read my analogy to the coke formula, think about what you just posted, realise how wrong you are (sorry for being rude, but your insistence on this, despite me explaining to you, in painstaking detail, what actually happened, is very frustrating on my part). Or else, please cite something specific about this case and how it relates to patents (and good luck). However, at this point, you cannot back up your statements with actual facts.
And no, there were not alternatives. The only two operating systems at the time that could truly work in a networked environment were windows and unix. It the same sense, one does not use a kitchen stove to run an industrial bakery. Sure its possible, but you will not stay in business long.
To arrive at a so-called monopoly market share, the trial court accepted a definition of the relevant market ("single user desktop PCs that use an Intel-compatible chip") that conveniently excluded all of the computers and networking software made by Microsoft's major rivals such as Apple, Sun, Novell, and a host of other companies. In addition, counting only licensed systems allowed Judge Jackson to exclude arbitrarily all of the operating systems sold at retail, those downloaded from the Web, and all "naked" computers shipped without any operating system installed at all. . . . If market share is meaningful at all in antitrust analysis (extremely doubtful), Microsoft's actual share of any realistic relevant market was less than 70% and not enough for any monopoly designation.
. . .
Nor was the Netscape browser ever unfairly "foreclosed" or "excluded" from the market; PC users downloaded millions of copies of Netscape's browser during the period of alleged exclusion by Microsoft.
Some examples of monopolies that were broken up, and explains that they got to their large market share through increasing efficiency and lowering cost.
Anti-trust, Anti-truth - Thomas J. DiLorenzo - Mises Daily
So now let's talk more specifically about Microsoft:
A Politically Incorrect Guide to Antitrust Policy - D.T. Armentano - Mises Daily
So why did Microsoft have such a large market share? They made a good product. Sure, patents help, even if you can't point to a specific case, people would avoid trying to infringe on that patent. Again, no one was ever prevented from entering the market. Microsoft was just simply the best at the time. Any problems were due to patents.
If you think nobody was prevented from entering the market, than you obviously did not understand what I wrote about programmatic interfaces.
Microsoft only had about a 70% market share, there were other OS's that could be used. The only way people were prevented from entering the market was through patents. Otherwise, Microsoft could do nothing to stop anyone.
1. Trade secrets (as Mega points out). The develop source code, but what they deliver to customers is a black box that "just works".
2. Copyright - if you managed to steal their source code, you can't just copy/paste it and not get in trouble.
3. Integration - In many software systems, once they get large and expansive enough, it looks something like this.
Software bundle does process a,b,c,d, they are all tied together.
A competitor has to bite of a small enough chunk to make it feasible, so they try to create processb, for example, better than the monopoly. They do, they do it 2x better, for 1/2 the cost!! A clear winner. Yet it's 100% useless, and unable to compete. Because it can't know how to talk to processA and C efficiently, no customer would be able to use it. This goes on an on, to costs of changing systems, training costs, expertise, etc. It effectively prevents competitive market entry this way.
Microsoft only had about a 70% market share, there were other OS's that could be used. The only way people were prevented from entering the market was through patents. Otherwise, Microsoft could do nothing to stop anyone.
Now you are talking about patents again? :shock:
I thought I had gotten you past that. I guess not
Oh well, I guess this is a useless exercise when you do not obviously understand any of my points.
I never dropped it. Just becuase you don't bring up a patent in a lawsuit does not mean that it is not discouraging competition. If you know that what you want to do is going to violate a patent then you have no reason to do it. You'll be shut down, it's illegal, so why start it in the first place?
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