Is it a monopoly?
Recently, Microsoft held a conference in which it told consumers of its new OS, Windows Vista. I told about how it would be clearer and more user friendly than Windows XP is. A while ago though, Microsoft had some trouble with Congress because people started accusing it of being a monopoly.
The reason I am showing you this article is to demonstrate that there are no other OS (Operating Systems) for a PC that I am aware of. Even if there is, I have never seen it advertised. Just because other companies do not want to go into the market for fear that they could not compete with Microsoft, does this make their company a monopoly? This case is slightly different than the Intel situation because there were other companies producing a chip.
1 comment:
In any Antitrust case one of the biggest decisions that the judge has to make is the definition of the relevant market. For example, in 1956 Du Pont was charged with attempting to monopolize the cellophane market. The government showed that Du Pont held a 75% market share of the cellophane market--not quite 100%, but pretty big nevertheless. Du Pont's lawyers, however, argued that the government's definition of the relevant market was too narrow. DuPont argued that they also faced competition from aluminum foil, butcher paper, and even day-old newspaper (people used to buy their fresh meats and fish wrapped in newspaper). If you include these other "flexible wrapping papers", then DuPont's market share was only 20%. The presiding judge agreed with DuPont's definition and that pretty much destroyed the government's case against DuPont.
In Microsoft's case, the judge defined the relevant market to not include Apple's Mac computers nor computers based on the (now popular) Linux operating system. This narrow definition of the relevant market pretty much sealed Microsoft's fate. (So, yes, Doug, there are alternatives to Windows!)
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