[Am-info] WSJ: "Do we get Enough In Innovation for What We Give to Microsoft?"

[Mark Dodel]

In yesterday's print Wall Street Journal "Do we get Enough In Innovation
for What We Give to Microsoft?", by Lee Gomes.

Unfortunately wsj.com (The bastion of pro-Trust Monopolists) is a
subscription site, so I can't point to a direct URL for it.

Article is mentioned here:
<http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/09/24.4.shtml> with some quotes. 
Interesting that the author questions the value Microsoft gives for the
estimated 10% of the cost of every PC that Microsoft gets.  

"But is the innovation from Microsoft commensurate with the awesome
resources it has been given?  The average Microsoft customer probably
wouldn't say so.  Indeed, the advances the company lists for its new
products all too often involve fixing shortcomings of earlier products,
such as security and reliability in the case of its operating systems, and
ease of use with its Office Suite.

In fact you can argue that genuine innovation is the last thing mopolists
want, since it threatens to upset the very applecart that made them rich
in the first place."  

So its a given that Microsoft is a monopoly and lacks any incentive for
innovation.  Why doesn't that offend people?  He later says:  "The world
expects a lot from great monopolies, and in the past many of them
delivered."  "great monopolies"?  Criminal enterprise is more like it.   
He mentions how Bell Labs and IBM both have amassed large numbers of
patents and awards for innovation, but then shakes it off saying that
"Microsoft's research group is still young".  So what has MSFT been doing
with all those billions they write off every year for research and
development?


-- 

 From the eComStation Desktop of: Mark Dodel

  Warpstock 2003 - See the video and presentations: http://www.warpstock.org

For a choice in the future of personal computing, Join VOICE - http://www.os2voice.org

  "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself.   That in it's essence, is Fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power." Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Message proposing the Monopoly Investigation, 1938