http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20080130/BLOG32/447014873/-1/RSS1013

tundraboy: “A historical myth? The record is there for all to see [ on Standard Oil]. Do a little digging in your local library.

As to the ‘real truth about Microsoft’ you can always read the court record U.S. v Microsoft.”

Here is an essay on Standard Oil by an Economist who spent his career analyzing Antitrust, D.T. Armentano:

“One of the most famous (and misunderstood) antitrust cases in history is US v. Standard Oil of New Jersey (1911).

The popular explanation of this case is that Standard Oil monopolized the oil industry, destroyed rivals through the use of predatory price-cutting, raised prices to consumers, and was punished by the Supreme Court for these proven transgressions. Nice story but totally false.

First, Standard never even monopolized petroleum refining, let alone the entire oil industry (production, transportation, refining, distribution) which would have been an impossibility. Even in domestic refining, Standard’s share of the market declined for decades prior to the antitrust case (64% in 1907) and there were at least 137 competitors (firms like Shell, Gulf, Texaco) in oil refining in 1911.

“A free-market ‘monopoly’ supplier is theoretically possible but not necessarily harmful and would not rationalize any antitrust regulation.”
Second, although predatory practices were alleged by the government at trial, Standard offered rebuttal on all counts. Neither the trial court nor the Supreme Court ever made any specific finding of guilt on the conflicting charges of predatory practices.

Third, petroleum market outputs increased and prices declined for decades during the alleged period of “monopolization” by Standard Oil. For example, prices for kerosene (the industry’s major product) were 30 cents a gallon in 1869 and fell to about 6 cents a gallon at the time of the antitrust trial.

Finally, the Supreme Court broke up the Standard Oil holding company not because of any demonstrable harm to consumers (there was none) but because it discerned some vague “intent” to monopolize through Standard’s many mergers, an “intent” that just as clearly never succeeded in producing any monopoly. Yet generations of economic and legal commentators have been misled about monopoly and the alleged efficacy of antitrust policy because of the ‘facts everybody knows’ concerning the Standard Oil antitrust case.”

BTW, Microsoft “won” its case at the appellate level, no? The Armentano essay also gives a view on the Microsoft Antitrust case. If you or any of the lurkers are interested read it here: [http://mises.org/story/2694#4d]

Dan Kurt

A historical myth? The record is there for all to see. Do a little digging in your local library.

As to the “real truth about Microsoft” you can always read the court record U.S. v Microsoft.

Then again, there are people who will not be swayed no matter what evidence you present them. They’ll always find some junk history or junk science to cling to: Holocaust deniers, climate change deniers, and I guess there’s the new category of robber baron deniers.

Microsoft’s great at making announcements, talking about fancy features coming sometime in the future, etc., but they seem incapable of actually *shipping* something. They can talk all they want, but until they actually release a REAL product on par with their competition, they’ll continue to fade into irrelevance.

Judging by what we’ve seen so far (like that fact that more mobile web browsing traffic comes from the iPhone alone than every WM device combined sold over the last 10 years), it may already be too late.

First, remote wipe is about wiping DATA off of your device that competitors, identity thieves or phishers could use. As far as I know, it does NOT wipe the operating system itself.

[Remote wipe can be used to lock the unit. After this story appeared, Microsoft announced it had wiped the missing phone. OF course, there was no way to verify that, as anyone could obtain WiMo 6.5 and say they'd stolen the missing phone to get it, and Microsoft could plausibly deny it - Dan]

As I doubt the device in question had important data on it, remote wipe wouldn’t help. Microsoft is worried about details of its OS being revealed, not the data on the device.

Second, Windows Mobile 6.5 isn’t incompatible with current devices. Even you proved that by citing people who have downloaded beta versions. You can’t even keep your facts straight within your article. There may not be any official upgrades available, but that’s another issue.

[Beta compatibility is not the same thing as offering an upgrade. Snow Leopard betas once supplied PPC binaries, but the shipping version will be Intel only, for example.

Microsoft has stated it simply won't ship its new browser for current phones, a major portion of WiMo 6.5: "Regarding making IE Mobile available as a separate download or update, the rich media experiences that IE Mobile 6 enables require more powerful, advanced devices. That is why it will not be available as an upgrade or direct download for current phones, but rather will be made available on new phones." - http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2008/11/11/internet-explorer-mobile-6.aspx ]

Third, Windows Mobile 5 wasn’t incompatible with previous devices, either. In fact, Dell and HP both launched official WM 5 upgrades to some of their previous Pocket PCs.

[WM 5 introduced a new run from RAM architecture that broke compatibility with the vast majority of the installed based of WM phones. The fact that you might be able to find some models that could be upgraded does not have any relevance. ]

Finally, saying “No new software release is going to bump ‘Windows Phone’ sales back up into the air after another year of iPhone advancement and the onslaught of every other smartphone maker working claim a portion of the smartphone pie” is ridiculous rhetoric. The iPhone came from nowhere to grab lots of market share, Android is in a similar position, RIM has reinvigorated itself and improved its market share and even Palm, written off by many as dead, has been getting positive press and buzz with WebOS.

If having a small share of the market for a few years meant the death of an OS, MacOS would have been dead before the 90s.

[Mac OS had nearly a 100% share of the professional graphics desktop in the 80s. Losing that share to Microsoft's Windows in the early 90s did mean the death of that OS and nearly of Apple itself.

You seem to assume that everyone else will replication Apple's success with the iPhone. Except that nobody did that to the iPod. And Android (and RIM BlackBerry Storm) have done nothing similar at their launch. Palm also got buzz over the Foleo, which it never even released. You can start talking about the Pre at the end of the year when it actually ships. ]

Steve

P.S. It’s not likely this will be posted, I suppose. My earlier rebuttal to your WM 6.5 hit piece hasn’t been approved, even though found time to write this. Apparently you only like comments from sycophants telling you what a “great post” you wrote. There’s a word for people like that….

[Unless your post is just strings of profanity, I don't intentionally refuse to publish it. Sometimes WordPress will flag comments as spam, which makes them harder to post, but most comments are approved automatically unless they trigger some flag, such as posting lots of links. If you post something and don't see it appear, you can email me. No need to be a douche nozzle though. ]

Ahistorical myth about Standard Oil. Wish I knew the real truth about Microsoft.

Dan Kurt

I kind of feel bad for Microsoft, it feels like for the last couple of year the company has really had no soul. I don’t understand what they’re trying to prove. Why stretch thin to compete in so many markets? Even if you do have the cash to burn…

If you have the highest market share (85%??) of computers worldwide, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to consistently exceed the expectations of your millions of users? I mean to really be the best out of knowing that you have the responsibility and opportunity to be a greatest software company to those countless people? That would be what would drive me every day if I were senior at Microsoft, screw having my name on every piece of hardware, I’d want to be king of the PC and then build upon that…

I once believed that building a PC slapping Windows on it was the ultimate freedom of having a great PC, but that’s not really the case. Great hardware sucks with poor software. And I think that consumers in general aren’t buying that “get the best hardware system to have the best PC experience” anymore. Proof of that is that cheap OEMs like eMachines are surviving just fine, and people buying Netbooks too. That really affects the way Microsoft is perceived. “I don’t really need all that power, I don’t really need Vista” – With Apple the opposite is happening, higher quality hardware is desirable for it’s fantastic operating system.

And my point is, that this “throw my seeds everywhere and see which one sprouts” is again manifested in Windows phones. The software apart from it’s main honey comb screen doesn’t really shout software excellence. It says of Microsoft, that it doesn’t really know how to compete in this space and it’s trying to wing it because that’s what it does. It’s a fledgling spawn from a sickly old Windows Mobile platform that was neglected for so long. And why was it all of a sudden resurrected into stardom? Because the iPhone made Smart Phones red hot and the company has arrived to the party too late to have a real foundation. I think Windows Mobile 6.5 is a complete fake, even 2 years into the arrival of the iPhone, it fails miserably at saying it will come for Apple.

This whole thing is more evidence to manufacturers that they really don’t need Microsoft. If software is what sells their hardware, then Microsoft is a plague. If they go Microsoft then they’re forced to compete on the hardware level. If they do well with one model, the next model won’t do so well because hardware is easy to copy. (Yikes if they want to introduce a patented technology if they stick with MS) They’ll hit a brick wall with Microsoft again. Software is what makes OEM products truly different and Microsoft won’t let manufacturers touch it’s software, which may lead them to compete on price, and that gets ugly because their products lose value. I think everybody else who licenses Android, Symbian, etc, should develop their own interfaces and modules combined with competitive hardware specs to truly standout.

Yet this won’t solve it for them, because they still don’t own that software in it’s entirety. (Which begs the question, why on earth did Nokia open Symbian?)

Apple, after all is said and done, has the highest potential because of owning it’s unique hardware and software combination with superb integration to it’s services and devices. There is nothing that the iPhone can’t do right now, in terms of software, and so the value of having better hardware to push that possibility is the direction it will take, this will make it the best device hands down for a couple of more rounds.

One area they are all desperate to catch up to is the App Store, the App Store is something truly remarkable because Apple already had the foundation of the iTunes store technology. Even if Symbian, Android, develop these, will their platforms risk becoming like Microsoft in that they would have to support different hardware? Maybe, Maybe not, I ask because I really don’t know.

The iPhone has truly changed everything.

Sorry about my long post, I was excited to share my first comment!