[MacDV] Re: iDVD 4 is sloooow

[Steven Rogers]

On Jan 24, 2004, at 11:03 PM, Mike Swope wrote:

> Eh? Your obtuse opinions aren't making sense to me. Apple's a monopoly 
> because...why?

Because they are a vertical monopoly - ever wonder why there are no 
movie theaters owned by movie studios, or car lots owned by car 
manufacturers? And they're a conventional monopoly - Apple is the only 
company that can sell you a Mac, or OS X. Just do a google search on 
vertical monopoly if you want more than you can stand to read about it.

> Apple has not *forced* anyone to use their technologies,

Neither has Microsoft.

>  including Safari, Mail, etc. Microsoft *forced* PC makers to keep IE 
> on machines and threatened to pull it licensing if they installed any 
> other competing product (namely Netscape) alongside IE in the default 
> installation for new machines. That's my understanding of the problem 
> with Microsoft. It was leveraging its user base (97%) to force buyers 
> (PC makers) to *exclude* competitors from 3rd party installations. 
> Apple has done none of this.

Microsoft doesn't *force* anyone to do anything - they simply tried to 
sell their products on their own terms, in the same way that Apple does 
- e.g., if you want to use iDVD, you're "forced" to buy a Mac. If you 
want to sell computer hardware, you're "forced" to not sell it with OS 
X.

Using the term "force" in this sense is just a tricky round-about way 
to make the old Marxist assertion that "property is theft". It lumps 
together two very different kinds of non-cooperation - the kind of 
non-cooperation of refusing to accept someone else's terms in a deal, 
vs. the kind of non-cooperation that proceeds from a robbery.

While you might casually say something like "I found a great lamp at a 
garage sale and wanted to pay $5 for it, but they 'forced' me to pay 
$10", its very important to distinguish that from a situation like "a 
guy stopped me in the alley and asked me for my wallet. I didn't want 
to give it to him, but he *forced* me to". Morally, these are opposite 
situations - one is the assertion of property rights, the other is 
violation of property rights - and its very significant that we have a 
slang habit of referring to them with the same word. If you don't know 
the difference between those two situations, you don't know the 
difference between property and theft.

If you want to say that its OK for Apple to do this because its tiny, 
and Microsoft looses that right because it has a lot of market share, 
then you better hope that the Mac never catches on.

SR