[Info-vax] Itanium and the NY antitrust suit against Intel

[Neil Rieck]

On Nov 24, 6:26 pm, mathog <dmat... at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> There are a couple of juicy tidbits in this article
>
> http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2355462,00.asp
>
> about the NY antitrust suit against Intel.  Of course, most of the
> article is about x86 competition, or the lack thereof.
> It was an oddly fascinating and yet disgusting read.  Sort of like an
> insightful review on the the mating habits of cannibalistic insects.
>
> Regards,
>
> David Mathog

In the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years there was a commonly held belief by
all citizens (in all western countries) that government should get out
of the way of business. The results of this philosophy go horribly
wrong when Microsoft effectively killed Netscape. In the article you
provided it looks like Intel was up to the same shenanigans as
Microsoft in the previous decade.

I am not advocating "big government". I am only saying there is
nothing wrong with "some" government controls and oversight (think
speed limits and stop lights on public roads). Obviously unbridled
capitalism can lead to unintended consequences. For example, after
Microsoft won the browser wars in the middle-to-late 1990s, they did
virtually nothing to advance the state of browser technology.
(Microsoft was now fixated on SUN so were copying Java into C# and
JavaScript into J++). It was Mozilla (with Firefox) and Google (adding
AJAX to their already popular search engine, etc.) that breathed new
life into a sleeping Microsoft.

I get the feeling that these big companies miss this point: "if all
their competition was removed then the resulting industry would end up
stagnating like anything we have seen in ex-communist East Europe or
the now defunct USSR.

NSR