Monopolies aren't illegal at all, what is illegal, is abusing your monopoly power to maintain your monopoly or extend your marketshare in other markets. For instance, Microsoft abusing their OS monopoly by forcing OEM's to bundle Windows licences with all new computers would be illegal, since it would keep competitors (like Lindows) from effectively competing. Or MS could abuse its monopoly power in the OS market to keep competitors in the office app market from competing (like ensuring windows would not properly run WordPerfect or whatever to increase their sales of Word/Office)
Looks like you might be nitpicking about what came first the chicken or the egg. Most monopolies have to be strictly governed with regulations like utility companies or gauging will occur. Competition is what usually protects the consumer. A monopoly is sooner or later going to abuse its power. M$ is walking on eggshells they want to grow more and more for obvious reasons. Not to much money in mice keyboards or web cams as in intels case. That OEM bundle thing was one of many monopoly abuses. Look at netcape and sun java, or what they are trying to do with media player being embedded in the OS to eliminate competition and gain royalties from music movies etc.
But there is nothing illegal or wrong about being a monopoly as such as long as you play by the rules.
This may be true but it will still happen. The justice department knows full well monopolies will abuse power or gauge the consumer it’s inevitable. Intel now sees real competition and cannot completely control where the x86 market goes. If it was not for amd rambus would most likely be the defacto standard in memory. This =’s a licence to print money for rambus through royalties on memory. Intel knew how this could be seen as monopoly abuse and intel cannot make there own or it clearly would be, so they invest quite heavy in rambus to reap the benefits of what would be monopoly abuse. AMD stopped this by having a better cpu using cheaper royalty free ddr. I’m not 100% on this next part but I read somewhere there was another reason or purpose to rambus and that was to keep the memory farther from the cpu to avoid the use of on die memory controllers. IMHO the tax intel imposed with a p4 bus licence is another example of abuse when you really think about it.
Probably, though the most important thing is for AMD to be profitable. Intel has so much more production capacity as AMD, that a 35% marketshare for AMD would actually give them "monopoly power" (well not really, but at least they would increase their prices susbstantially since they would have a hard time producing enough to keep up demand). As long as FAB35 isn't online, ~20-25% marketshare would be plenty for AMD to ensure healthy competition (intel has enough capacity to produce 100%, maybe even 120% of world wide demand, so they will have to compete for the 25% they are "missing").
That’s a fair opinion, I did say 2 years or so, and fab36 (not 35) should be well online by then. Actually in 1 year and in full production in a year and ½ so 2 years or more amd could possibly grow to 35% especially with window64 available and 300mm wafers on 90 amd maybe 65nm. AMD needs volume to compete in all x86 cpu segments cause that is where intel will make money if amd is not there then squeeze amd where they compete. So for amd to get asp’s up they must compete in all segments or intel will just squeeze them in the segments they do buy making more money in the segment amd don’t compete in.
Personally, I'd like to see a third player gaining some inroads into this x86 market, even though its not likely to happen (best chance I see might be nVidia buying Transmeta, and competing more effectively in the mobile market, but that won't be for tomorrow). In the 486 days we had a bunch of more less competitive players (Intel, AMD, Cyrix, UMC, IBM,..) but I fear R&D costs and fab costs are so incredible high we will likely be limited to 2 major players in the cpu and gpu markets.
Exactly would be nice but not likely to happen. We are most likely going to be stuck with two real x86 cpu makers. And two is better than one.
But they aren't going to be broken up, unless they have been proven to abuse their power. So they aren't broken up for being what they are.. Besides, most monopolies dissapear without any intervention, they tend to get lazy, greedy, overcharge and do not innovate enough, therefore someone else steps in to take a piece of the pie (think IBM in the PC world, 3DFX for 3D cards, etc, ..).
M$ was proven in court to have abused their powers as a monopoly with netcape the justice dept took very serious the issue of breaking M$ up into 2 parts an OS and an IE office segment. If this had happened I believe the consumer would be better off. Give the second company IE, office, media player, maybe directx. And maybe a level playing field with linux would exist. M$ makes a great product with windows and when you think of the R&D that goes into it, it’s cheap. $105 for oem xp-home. Anti virus software could cost you more. M$ biggest issue is security but that would subside somewhat if much more people used linux as virus writers target windows cause 95% use windows. And lots of money could be made selling the other stuff like office, IE, media player, licening directx to linux. M$ is being watched and walking on eggshells has the EU investigation with media player been resolved yet?
A monopoly like MS has on the OS market might be harder to break, as it would almost require a Windows-compatible OS (like OS/2 once). Actually, I would find that a good thing, if MS where to be forced to open up *all* its API's so anyone could build a 100% Windows compatible OS without doing any reverse engineering like is required for Linux/Wine. That would certainly improve innovation.
Yes making 2 M$ OS’s would probably not be feasible but doing what I said above makes sense to me. Too bad it never happened. Maybe next time. As to intel the monopoly is being reduced do to amd although issues still arise like the EU investigating government tenders stating to bid computers must use intel cpu’s. We will have to wait and see how that develops.
I stand by what I said monopolies are usually illegal. The justice dept focus was to prove M$ a monopoly in order to punish or break up M$ for it's abuse. With a monopoly abuse is inevitable unless governed by another body even then it’s unproductive overall, so laziness and consumer gauging sort of happens. It’s only a matter of time for a monoply and M$ has abused its monopoly in the past and is walking on eggshells.
If I glanced at a spilt box of tooth picks on the floor, could I tell you how many are in the pile. Not a chance, But then again I don't have to buy my underware at Kmart.
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