• explodicle@local106.com
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    1 year ago

    With money he got from a monopoly, meaning the money he took plus the deadweight loss are even worse for humanity. Computers would be even better today if it wasn’t for him, and we would’ve produced better things than we have today.

    Monopolists “giving back” is insidious because it’s much easier to see what they gave us than what they took away.

    • porkins@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      The standardization of operating systems was an important step though. If there were hundreds of different OS’s on the market, then the PC generation would have stalled. The fact that there were basically only three dominant platforms meant that we could have market stability.

      • explodicle@local106.com
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        1 year ago

        Where have you heard that a monopoly can be more beneficial than harmful because of standardization? Has that happened with any other monopolies?

        • porkins@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          It’s common sense. If you have hundreds of operating systems, then it becomes a pain to get the right software. First, developers are discouraged because they don’t know what platform will be best to develop on and users will be discouraged because they might need to install twenty different OS partitions in order to run the software they want to run.

          • explodicle@local106.com
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            1 year ago

            No offense but no it is not common sense. The economics of monopolies have been studied for centuries, including any benefit from standardization (like with Standard Oil). It creates a costly deadweight loss.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Monopoly_and_efficiency

            For what it’s worth I was there, and the handful of OSes in the 1980s (not 20) weren’t as problematic as the monopoly later. It seems like common sense to me that today’s multiple browsers are better than IE standardization was.