http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/26/songsmith/

I think that you need to look up the definition of the word ‘monopoly.’ There are many alternatives to Windows and Office and nobody is forcing individuals or corporations to purchase MSFT products.

When it comes to MSFT, your usually astute analysis seems to go completely out the window. I don’t know why, though I understand you have some personal history that clouds your perspective. Whatever the case, your comments simply aren’t based on the facts, which renders your analysis completely useless.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a wide variety of Microsoft innovations, not the least of which would be the technology that underlies .NET. The next time you park yourself in front of a Mac, you might be interested to know that nearly half of the user interface elements (combo boxes, movable-modal dialog boxes, spinner controls are just a few examples), were first developed either on Windows or in Microsoft applications running on the Mac.

Have you forgotten how long it took for Apple to deliver an operating system that did not require users to tell it how much memory a program needed in order to run? And they couldn’t even accomplish that simple feat without starting out with someone else’s operating system.

The copiers in Cupertino run just as hot and hard as do the copiers in Redmond.

As for Zune sales vis-a-vis the iPod, don’t you think the fact that Apple has their own retail outlet chain might have had something to do with these results?

One of MS’s big failings over the past several years has been its lack of advertising for its products, feeling that because it was MS, it didn’t need to. Perhaps the biggest advertising failure being in the case of Vista, which is actually better than XP, but which MS did not feel obliged to advertise, leaving consumers with little but now-invalid 2 year old rants about compatibility floating around the net and the Mac switcher ads which are effective if often deceptive. It seems to be trying a different tack with Win7. Ballmer is a marketing guy. We’ll see if they have wised up over the next 9 months.

In a competitive market where the margins naturally drop to to the costs of production, players of iPod or Zune quality would cost, perhaps, $20. They would be impulse items at the checkout line. Not only that, but you should be able to buy a generic unit and program it with whatever user interface features you like. Such is the nature of the technology. Equilibrium in this market lies in that direction.

Currently, premium rents are commanded in that player market *solely* on the back of catalogs and in-production artists, combined with IP laws as rather unconvincingly upheld by the likes of RIAA. The expensive players are expensive solely because the “cool content” is only officially legally safe via those players, at least in any convenient form. The devices are incidental – it’s the I.P. monopolies that dominate.

It’s not simply MSFT that is the big bloated monopolist – it’s the entire industry in its current form. iPod is the last big star in that universe.

Change is coming because the record companies are failing in the early stages of their pipeline: the new artist stage. No young musician at all, any more, plans to make a career of the record company scheme. Nobody (who matters, artistically) is hitchhiking to L.A. or Nashville, any more, so to speak. And so the record companies have reached “peak value” on their catalogs and consequently the software-restricted-player market is all about making margins on the downside of a trend whose death is visible on the horizon.

The actual product here (one of these players) is some input devices, an LCD, some memory and a slot for a memory card, some networking HW, and a (mediocre at best) D/A converter. This is a generic, useful set of inexpensive components. The entire iPod/Zune industry is a bunch of BS around the idea of making that combo of simple hardware precious through legal trickery. *Of course* that industry is going to fall to pieces and go to hell.

-t