Re: How Much Has Bill Overcharged America?

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

  I agree with Pieter and others who point out the difficulty in using
  simple one product models to describe the software market.  In one sense
  a word processor is "a" product, but in another sense there are many
  different ideas about what a word processor (or other applications) is
  supposed to do.  When one application is available, and only one,
  everyone uses the same product.  People who want and appreciate
  different approaches and features don't have practical options. 
  Antitcompetitive actions (withholding undocumented features of the API,
  modifying the code to undermine rivals, anticompetitive bundling, etc),
  which drive rivals from the market reduce choices which might otherwise
  have been available.  This is a "cost" of the anticompetitive actions.
  
    It is also true that while Microsoft has not overpriced Windows 95,
  the prices for many MS applications have been rising.  This is partly
  due to changes in corporate license terms (such as concurrent licenses),
  regular price increases (look at Office prices lately), and things such
  as forced upgrades (getting Word 97 to read Word 97 file formats,
  changes in excel which changed the display of fonts and electronic
  forms, etc).
  
  
     Jamie
  
  Pieter Nagel wrote:
  > On Fri, 21 Nov 1997, charles mueller wrote:
   
  > Ever since your "economies of scale" post I have had the uneasy
  > feeling that we're kind of missing the mark somewhere; your
  > question about overpricing relates to that.
  
    [snip]
  
  
  -- 
  James Packard Love
  Consumer Project on Technology
  P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
  202.387.8030 | fax 202.234.5176
  love@cptech.org | http://www.cptech.org