[extropy-chat] economics of scarcity to economics of plenty

[Alfio Puglisi]

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, BillK wrote:

> On 10/31/05, Jack Parkinson wrote:
>>
>> For minor examples of alternatives - look at how much better Firefox is than
>> IE... and how frequently it is updated, how customizable... Look at
>> Microsoft - a behemoth that takes 5 years to produce the next version of
>> Windows - Linux developers run rings around them...
>>
>
> Minor nit-picking here. I am no supporter of Microsoft, but they have
> a very successful business running just fine, at present.
>
> If IE has over 90% of the market and is bringing in no direct income,
> why bother to spend resources on changing it?

I think that's exactly Jack's point here - Internet Explorer is good for 
the business that made it (apart from direct income, IE is very useful for 
vendor lock-in using ActiveX, frontpage-generated sites, windows media 
player integration, and so on), but not for the users (feature-poor, full 
of exploits, etc). It took a non-business generated browser to have a 
better one. From this point of view, the corporation model was inefficient 
at creating value for the society.

Alfio