All Posts Tagged With: "Microsoft"
World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies
Journalist Ken Auletta’s book about the Microsoft antitrust case is not just another Microsoft-bashing diatribe. On the contrary, World War 3.0 is a remarkably evenhanded investigation of this infamous case, providing some good insights into the basis (or lack of it) of the now-nullified judicial order to break Microsoft into two companies. Unfortunately, the book [...]
30Jun2010 | Barbara R. Hunter | 0 comments | ContinuedIt’s Always Something
Our economy is in the middle of an extraordinary run of success. Unemployment is low.Personal wealth is near an all-time high. Real wage growth sometimes appears less robust, but when benefits are included, real compensation is healthy. And even with the cries from some that economic mobility
isnt what it once was, legal and illegal immigrants continue
to flock to the United States. Evidently being poor here beats being poor elsewhere by a long shot.
Postal Monopoly: Playing by Different Rules
Once again the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is seeking to use its monopoly power to defy the economic law of demand. On April 8 the USPS requested an increase in the first-class letter rate from 37 to 39 cents, a 5.4 percent jump. Between 2000 and 2004, the price of first-class postage increased 12.1 percent, [...]
1Jul2005 | Robert Carreira | 1 comment | ContinuedAntitrust After Microsoft: The Obsolescence of Antitrust in the Digital Era
What’s in a name? Even the simple title, Antitrust After Microsoft, suggests a question: Will there ever be an after Microsoft? Federal antitrust agencies have investigated and prosecuted Microsoft since 1990. The resolution of the federal suit, the focus of the author’s attention, will not lay to rest the actions it encouraged, as entities including [...]
1Oct2002 | Laura Bennett Peterson | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Real Monopoly
What is a monopoly? The attorneys general of the nine states and the District of Columbia that are now engaged in their latest legal attack on Microsoft apparently have no idea. Because if they did, they would be focusing their ire not on Microsoft, but on the U.S. Postal Service, which has authorized another 3-cent [...]
1Aug2002 | John Berthoud | 1 comment | ContinuedRebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution
Perseus Publishing • 2001 • 334 pages • $27.50 Reviewed by Andrew Morriss During the Microsoft antitrust trial a great deal of ink was spilled in the press over Microsoft’s alleged monopolization of various markets and its practices in marketing both its browser (Internet Explorer) and its operating systems (such as Windows 2000). Although Judge [...]
1May2002 | Glyn Moody | 0 comments | ContinuedCapitalism and Coercion
A century and more ago, when Marxism was in its ascendancy as a theory, its followers (as well as many others) naturally believed its dogma about workers being the helpless pawns of capitalists–forced to sell their labor at less than its true worth, with no real alternative. But now, despite Marxism’s collapse as both a [...]
1Feb2002 | Allan Levite | 1 comment | ContinuedMonopolies in America: Empire Builders and Their Enemies from Jay Gould to Bill Gates by Charles R. Geisst
Oxford University Press • 2000 • 355 pages • $30.00 The current Microsoft court case, hotly debated and full of economic implications, makes a historical study of monopolies and antitrust law very relevant. Unfortunately, business historian Charles Geisst’s Monopolies in America is incomplete and one-sided, mostly reiterating the traditional statist interpretation of big business and [...]
1Apr2001 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Philosophical Influence Behind the Microsoft Trial
Barbara Hunter is an advanced level computer support specialist at a large law firm. “. . . trial moves rapidly on when the judge has determined the sentence beforehand.” —spoken by Malvoisin in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe It may seem that the Microsoft antitrust trial was anything but rapid, but a closer examination reveals a [...]
1Oct2000 | Barbara R. Hunter | 0 comments | ContinuedImperfect Opponents
“Microsoft and the government were the perfect opponents. The government has some power, but Microsoft has at least as much. Anyone else facing either one of them would be overmatched.” That is not some comedian’s line. It was spoken in all seriousness, I presume, by David Boies, who led the Justice Department’s antitrust case against [...]
1Oct2000 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedWinners, Losers and Microsoft
Artemus Ward once remarked that the problem with the world isn’t what we don’t know: “It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.” That observation aptly describes the current debate over standards and competition in the high-tech field. Everyone knows that in video recorders Beta was better than VHS, but that VHS somehow won [...]
1Jun2000 | James L. Gattuso | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Microsoft Case: Divestiture Won’t Help Consumers
D. T. Armentano is professor emeritus in economics at the University of Hartford and author of Antitrust and Monopoly (Independent Institute) and Antitrust: The Case for Repeal (Mises Institute). Critics of Microsoft, rallied by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s finding that the company has monopoly power over much of the computer industry, have urged a breakup [...]
1Apr2000 | D. T. Armentano | 0 comments | ContinuedBarbarians at Bill Gates
William Shughart is the Frederick A. P. Barnard Distinguished Professor of Economics and holder of the Robert M. Hearin Chair in Business Administration at the University of Mississippi. It was a glorious fall day on the East Coast when Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Joel Klein stepped up to the microphone at a news conference [...]
1Apr2000 | William F. Shughart II | 0 comments | ContinuedRegulatory Extortion
Thomas DiLorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. This article is based on a presentation prepared for the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s conference, “Austrian Economics and the Financial Markets,” last September in Toronto. In 1978 Michael Jensen and William Meckling, writing in the Financial Analysts Journal, offered an extraordinarily gloomy [...]
1Mar2000 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 8 comments | ContinuedHands Off
A Microsoft study from November 1997 reveals that the company could have charged $49 for an upgrade to Windows 98—there is no reason to believe that the $49 price would have been unprofitable—but the study identifies $89 as the revenue-maximizing price. Microsoft thus opted for the higher price. Thus wrote U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield [...]
1Feb2000 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedStop Stopping Price Cutting
“There’s nothing new under the sun.” This aphorism speaks volumes about Uncle Sam’s antitrust suit against Microsoft. One of the government’s principal accusations in this suit is that Microsoft is a predator—meaning that the attractive deals that Microsoft today offers to consumers cannot be matched by its rivals. When the hapless rivals eventually are bankrupted [...]
1Nov1999 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedPrinciples for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good
Law and economics were once openly tied, as witness the title of John Stuart Mill’s 1848 work, Principles of Political Economy. Or consider that Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek both held doctorates from the University of Vienna not in economics but in jurisprudence. Economics came into its own as a “pure” science, however, [...]
1Nov1999 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | Continued-
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