Quote from: jpinkman on July 09, 2012, 02:00 amQuote from: anarcho47 on July 08, 2012, 10:40 pmYour perspective I would argue is naive. "Destroying" competition by offering something better or cheaper or solving a problem in completely new, more effective way is not "destroying" anything. <--snip-->Nope, you're still not getting it. I'm not referring to innovation or ingenuity in designing a superior product with a competitive advantage that benefits consumers when it's brought to market. That's the fairytale you've been brought up to believe. Not saying there's still not some truth to that, especially as a first gen pioneer bringing an innovative product to brand new markets. But there are plenty of superior products that should enjoy a competitive advantage that fail all the time because of other darker market forces at work, which I believe BNW made some reference to up-thread. I'll give you a fairly sanitized example. In the early nineties, a host of innovation in office application software run on the MS platform began coming up. WordPerfect for windows was such a product with a superior feature set that made it the word processor of choice at the time. But Microsoft's extreme wealth from owning 80+% of the desktop market and creator of the platform these apps ran on placed it in a dominant position when they decided to "compete" in the office app sector. After introducing their office apps like msword they simply gave it away for free until it drove all competitors into bankruptcy. They could afford it, it was no skin off their back since their bread and butter was the OS market. And they got away with it with a slap on the wrist, a mere fine. Gates had catapulted to the pole position of world's wealthiest and was determined to stay there. So they repeated this market strategy with some new wrinkles when they decided to go after Netscape and own the browser market. Not only did they make their Internet Explorer free, but they used the fact it ran on their OS to unfair advantage by making it run at higher priority, and therefore faster, than anything an independent software developer like Netscape would have been capable of doing. Not because NS developers lacked the innovation and ingenuity to do so, they had plenty of both and NS was a superior browser feature wise at the time, but because they didn't have access to Microsoft's proprietary and protected source code and couldn't optimize it to prioritize Netscape legally even if they did. And back during the days of dial-ups and limited e-commerce, speed was all that really mattered.So as you all know, Netscape was run into the ground. But this event turned some heads since Netscape was far bigger than WordPerfect and was also a Wall Street darling. And we should all know by now why Wall Street titans are referred to as Masters of the Universe and that it can be precarious walking into the cross-hairs of the MoU without some political cover. An epic, multi-state and multi-country antitrust lawsuit ensued against MS. Gates was somewhat late in getting into the game of political lobbying, one of the common playgrounds of oligarchs, but once he committed to the game in late '98 he tackled it with the same single minded tenacity as he had in becoming the dominant force in the OS market. And why wouldn't he? Because of his ruthless, value destroying anti-competitive practices in his dogged pursuit of markets he felt entitled to own, his baby was now under threat of being smashed up into 3 separate companies. In '99 when judge Penfield Jackson overseeing the case announced that MS was going to pay, he was pretty much telegraphing the certainty of the breakup, that MS had repeatedly ignored gov warnings about wielding their near monopoly unfairly, and this was the last straw. Working in the industry at the heart of silicon valley, I remember after that announcement no one in their right mind thought MS would survive.Yet a few weeks before the ruling was expected to come down Gates was furiously lobbying congress meeting personally and donating generously to members of the senate commerce committee, lobbying the White House, and announced that his foundation was donating 1 billion to organizations that provided scholarships to black Americans. Then two weeks following the ruling, the gov announced it would be going into arbitration with MS to figure out how to proceed, if at all. It was announced that judge Jackson had chosen his colleague Judge Richard Posner, a libertarian and freshwater trained legal scholar, to hear the arbitration and decide the case, shocking MS's enemies. The rest, as we know, is history.Now there are cases of the wealthiest using black practices far more unsavory and destructive than what Gates did in this fairly sanitary example. But it happens often enough, and far more deviant things happen behind the scenes than the public is even aware, that it should be considered the rule and not the exception. And think about it. Someone worth in the tens of billions doesn't play by the same rules that you or I since they don't have to. They have enough to buy anyone, compromise any institution, assemble their own private black-op militias to do whatever dirty work they want including sabotage and industrial espionage of up and coming competitors while maintaining enough insularity to create plausible deniability that they'll never get anything more than a slap on the wrist even if caught. And if you think I'm exaggerating, one of the wealthiest and most prolific had his multinational corps caught doing precisely these things in recent years. As a thought experiment, I'll let you figure out exactly who that is. I personally have a very low tolerance for conspiracy theorists and without personal, firsthand knowledge of the kind of shenanigans that go on, might be more inclined to believe the fairytale since it's nice, safe, and comfortable to think the wealthiest in the world should be idealized for "pulling humanity forward". It's never so simple. When I look at the wealthiest 100 only Warren Buffet stands out as someone who *might* not have gotten his hands dirty (although it wouldn't surprise me if he had) since his talent is in investment rather than corporation building and market share pwning. He's also one of the good guys who's used his position to rail against the wealthy for stealing from the middle class while bringing awareness of the tactics used by the .01% to his great personal detriment. After a sustained propaganda campaign by his wealthy enemies which ended up with middle class tools he was sticking up for turning on him, calling him a socialist (I know, Buffet a socialist? rotfl) and he became the target of a politically motivated IRS investigation into 1 billion of his finances he backed off, but is still putting his efforts behind trying to get the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes.And those are just the individuals on the Forbes list. There are plenty that are in that sphere that hide their wealth in corporations because they know the limelight places unwanted oversight on their underhanded strategies and tactics.So when I said I believe you suffer from a certain mainstream naivete, you really shouldn't take it so personally that you turn around and try and accuse me of the same ... it's just that, well, you do.No offense to you, but your example is, again, full of fallacies.First of all, why should MS have been prevented from GIVING AWAY something? Hell, why should they have been prevented from doing whatever they hell they wanted with the resources from the profits of windows? (There are some fucked up things with MS but they all have to do with artificial violent constructs like copyright and IP, and they don't need to be touched on here because that is TRILLIONS of dollars of misallocated resources around the world, and it's not due to some evil "oligarchs".)The "value destroying" argument you made was actually microsoft employing its resources to create a web-browser (that, at the time, was better than netscape) and give it away to its customers. It didn't destroy value, it freed up the several billion dollars per year that customers were originally deploying towards netscape's browser. That's not "ruthless", it's just smart. And the customers win.Now, MS has since switched over to charging for its Office pack, but that has already been spanked by the free market again, as Open Office is completely free.What you are saying right now is that we should be shutting down Google for creating the android OS and charging ZERO licensing fees to use it. You are saying that it is value-destroying that people in Africa can purchase a basic chinese spartphone for $89.00 running the Android OS, that would cost them about $200 to run Windows for phone, and would be impossible to get from a company like Apple (also running proprietary and soon to have some major failures on that front).What you are railing against is progress. It's not "ruthless", just because it does something better or cheaper than someone else. If the customers win, and no violence is employed, why the hell should we want to try to destroy the institution enriching society by giving it more, for less?Have you ever heard of an actual consumer filing an anti-trust lawsuit? Accusing a company of being "monopolistic"? US Steel got broken up because they were putting their competitors out of business with their superior production methods and low prices. The price of steel rose by over 20% because of this. The customers got hurt, not the businesses that should have failed.By what merit or measurement do you choose, based on your strange and (from my view, anyway) arbitrary definition of someone who is innovating and someone who is "ruthless" (by whatever it is that your definition of that word is)?