DISQUS

MikeT · 3 years ago

One of the things that platform monopoly advocates don't take into consideration is the fact that the most successful platforms have been open ecosystems. Windows kicked so much ass in the marketplace because of its (fairly) neutral and open APIs that didn't require licensing to develop and sell products on. From a "public policy perspective," it makes no sense to create a system biased toward platform monopoly rights because a platform simply cannot achieve its maximum worth through one vendor.

I think that Microsoft should have every legal right to license their libraries to developers as they see fit, but people like Prof Picker would do well to consider that with the XBox, that isn't the issue. Microsoft already has the legal right to license the libraries and trademarks it uses for its XBox to select developers. They don't need additional power to make good returns on their investment. Any additional power is just a slap in the face of individual property owners, the very people that public policy wonks claim to care about.

For self-proclaimed utilitarians, they seem to be awfully obsessed with individual rights to the exclusion of broader considerations like the damage that their proposals would do to millions of property owners. This is why it is contradictory to say that one is a libertarian while holding utilitarian public policy values.

Lastly, the single biggest blunder that these people make, at least in terms of IT, is assuming that the practical results of R&D; here are something more than derivative, let alone evolutionary. The XBox is, for example, a stripped down PC. AFAIK, it even uses the exact same DirectX APIs that a Windows PC uses for games. Most of the cost associated with it was simply creating a stripped down PC and absorbing the cost of selling it at a loss.