Comment on Steve Jobs: The difference of stealing yourself vs being stolen from
porkins@sh.itjust.works 9 months agoThe 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 9 months 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 9 months 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 9 months 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.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Monopoly_and_effic…
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.