Judge raps Microsoft for antitrust 'foot-dragging'

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No no no no no.... let me try again using your analogy

Having a better product is a legal and acceptable means of competition - no argument there. But we are not talking about simply a better product winning, but using monopoly in one market to leverage a monopoly in another market. To use your airplane analogy:

Lets say there is one, dominant supplier of aircraft and runways. They make billions out of selling aircraft and runways to everyone (their aircraft can only take off and land on their runways, BTW). I come along with a hovercraft, which can use anyone's runway. I am dominant in the small, but potentially large, hovercraft business. The incumbant aircraft/runway manufacturer, sensing a threat to their monopoly, buy my smaller rival and then use profits from the ir aircraft/runway monopoly to subsidize giving away hovercrafts. So if you buy one of their runways, you get a hovercraft for free ("part of the runway"). More over, retailers of their runways are ordered not to stock my hovercraft. Now - it doesn't matter if their hovercraft works on steam and pistons, and mine works on jet engines, the fact is most people will stop buying my hovercrafts because "they come with the runway package of competitor X and, whilst not as good as your jet hovercraft yet, they are free." To add insult to injury, they keenly develop their hovercrafts until they are super jet double atomic propelled, albeit with some flaws, and my plans for the hovercraft are given to the engineering community. Whereupon hovercraft development stops at the large aircraft/runway manufacturer.

Your analogy of piston aircraft vs jet aircraft, although amusing, was flawed in that Netscape were not selling an OS, nor were they competing in the OS market. Andresson (?sp) made a statement that the OS would play a less dominant role as the browser expanded. It is a bit like saying runways will decline once hovercrafts become common. Netscape were in the browser business - a browser that ran in the OS. MS were selling an OS, but wanted to have a monopoly in the browser market, and used their monopoly in the OS market to do it.

Nothing about races of similar things or competing like products - more about disparate products and a larger corporation using its dominance in one product to gain dominance in another.

Regards

The Banjo

Posted by: BanjoPaterson   Posted on: 02/14/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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