I Totally Support the Occupy Movement...Follow

Expert testimonials are only valid if they agree with you.

Not just this topic. Every topic.

I'm the 0.5%!

You know literally 200 times more math than me!

****, 2008 again.

I swear this thing is broken.

There's some irony when you post this right after a slew of attacks on me criticizing people's reading comprehension.

Not in the context of earning money and market share they don't.

In the mid 90s, there were a half dozen large corporations producing operating systems and applications software for numerous computer uses to run on several different computer platforms. Today, there are basically three. And one of them (Sun Microsystems) was bought by Oracle (a database/applications company in case you're confused) and likely within the next few years will be relegated to appliance systems (specialized systems not used for general computing). The second is Apple, which has been moving away from the core computing industry (was never more than a niche to begin with) for most of the last decade and moving also into specialty gadgets (iphone, ipad, etc).

You can't seriously be arguing that the various open and near-open software vendors out there are actually competing with MS in terms of market profitability. They make enough money to keep their doors open and manage it largely because there's a huge number of people basically helping them write their software for free. And in return, they charge minimal amounts of money bundling said "free" software into distributions. Charging for the building, testing, and support, but not even in the remote neighborhood of what MS earns selling its products.

In the world of "making money selling computer stuff", about the only area MS doesn't dominate today is EDA tools. It has vastly greater "market share" today than it did back then. And, as I pointed out already, but some are still confused over, total relative volume of a market is only half of what makes something a monopoly. It's the ability to control the market and *force* customers to buy your product that does. MS wasn't doing that back in the 90s with the browsers. It absolutely is doing that today with messaging and domain space authentication systems. I work for a company which lost a multi-million dollar lawsuit solely (and I'm not making this up) because "you don't use MS exchange to handle your email, so we don't have this trusted data fingerprint showing when you sent various notices and responses". Let's ignore the fact that no one in the history of legal documentation had *ever* had this or needed it, the law is basically giving MS a monopoly.

Want to know where every corporation is going (has already gone) with regards to internal web authentication? MS domain certs. Why? Because SOX rules require an authentication model exactly like the one that MS built with its domain system. Never mind that it's no more secure than other models, that's the one the law mandates, so they win. So no more apache servers using the much more secure kerberos methodology. Nope. Everyone has to authenticate themselves to a windows domain server, else you get slapped with a fine (or have your stock downgraded).

And lets not get me started on servers having to have virus scanning software installed and kept up to date. Seriously. Think about that for a moment and see how absurd it gets when you're trying to explain to a SOX auditor why your server doesn't have virus scanning installed (cause it's not a windows box and thus doesn't *need* a virus scanner). It's become the circus of the freaking absurd in the IT world, and MS and government regulations are absolutely at the center of it.


Sure, windows has competition for the hobbyist (who certainly have more options today than they used to). But they aren't where the money is. They exist because they're under the radar and aren't big enough money targets to go after. It's laughable to anyone who works at a high level in the IT field to have someone try to insist that MS has less influence today than they had say 10 years ago. I've watched as MS has systematically used its leverage in the market and in the government regulations to force companies to buy their products. And I can tell you first hand that it's not because of "free" bundling, or even API changing. It's because of their influence with regulators.

Edited, Dec 2nd 2011 4:52pm by gbaji

Well, speaking of here in B.C. median incomes for younger people have actually declined since 1976 and the cost of housing has gone up by 149%

That's with more households being DUAL income, rather than single income, as well.

So, I can see why Canada has an occupy movement. And we haven't even started talking about student loans/the cost of education/ the need to get an education to have a decent job yet.

Source:


PDF of report by UBC early human learning initiative can be found here

While B.C. is by far the worst in terms of growing inequality (especially for younger people) it is not by any stretch of the imagination unique in Canada for making life tougher on ordinary folks. Housing costs across Canada have skyrocketed while wages have remained largely stagnant. University/Technical Training is required to get the kind of salaries people used to get without even finishing high school - and it is more expensive than ever as well - and our student loans are practically extortion with the interest rates on them.

So I can totally understand why Canada has an occupy movement. Who gives a damn if Canadian corps are making more than ever, when that increased wealth isn't making its way to ordinary citizens?

Gbaji... your own quote is talking about SOFTWARE not HARDWARE or do you not know the difference?

It's true. He knows it 200x better than us.

Even though we were discussing a monopoly based on browsers, not OSs.

That made me nostalgia.

I personally do not know anyone who actually uses IE. Except to download Chrome, or Firefox. But I guess that makes it the most popular program for replacing itself.

Do you know anyone who pays for Chrome or Firefox? That should be your first hint that the actual browser you use isn't where any money is made and that you're missing a big part of the whole picture.