John Kawakami

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since April 28, 2001

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April 28, 2001, on Why Bill Gates is Richer than You:
The two posts that really stood out for me were the one that basically said "a monopoly is good for software because it lowers programming costs, leading to more products at a lower cost," and the other one that said "Gates is very smart and has the right kind of management." I have to say that, as much as I hate the MS monopoly, these are correct observations. Monopolies are neither good nor bad. They are a useful way to deal with expensive situations -- by guaranteeing profits to an expensive enterprise, you reduce risk. They have the terrible side effect of "making the rich, richer" and thus, are fundamentally unfair to every business that's not a monopoly. Windows succeds, in part, because it reduces the expense of developing software and running computer systems. Granted, this isn't completely true anymore because of Linux, but until Linux helped defragment the obnoxious unix server market (hpux, aix, solaris, bsd, unixware, sco, irix, etc. etc.) system administration and...