i’m sure the free market will solve this. we just need to wait for a new company to pop up, make a new operating system, ensure windows programs are properly emulated, convince the majority of people and businesses to use it, and then use its new monopoly for good.
Free market ideas always sounded like cartoon level intelligence to me. Some kind of a perfect world where everyone acts morally and people are well informed and chooses the right companies etc.
its really absurd. it becomes even stupider when considering that many of these assumptions allow mathematical models to be built on top of them, and then those models are treated with such importance and authority. but then they sometimes also get the math wrong. i remember learning a while back that part of the 2009 housing crash was caused by faulty mathematics laid ontop of these weird economic assumptions. the part im talking about is:
The paper, generally referred to as the Dahlem report, condemns a growing reliance over the past three decades on mathematical models that improperly assume markets and economies are inherently stable, and which disregard influences like differences in the way various economic players make decisions, revise their forecasting methods and are influenced by social factors.
the first part refers to a kind of “smoothness assumption”, where they approximate the bumpy, jagged graph with a “smooth” curve that is easier to analyze. but it turned out the bumps were there for a reason. oops! the second part of the quote then says that in addition to the faulty smoothness assumption, there were quite a few important things the model flat out ignored
It doesn’t require people to act morally, it requires them to act according to their long term self interest, assuming they are… immortal. And we all know human beings are omniscient and immortal. So no problem. /s
But it doesn’t, it just requires people to act in their short term self interest, and government’s role should be to ensure the long term costs are included in current market prices. So things like Pigouvian taxes and regulations should increase short term costs for things with long term costs.
The problems we see aren’t problems with capitalism (capitalism is working as expected in serving short term interests), the problem is with governments not doing their job in accounting for longer term costs.
But that’s not how it works. Free market ideas don’t expect a perfect world, they instead expect an imperfect one. You don’t need everyone to make food decisions, you just need enough people to make good decisions so the market caters to them.
It’s the same idea as democracy, you don’t need every voter to make a good choice, you just need a plurality. As long as enough people make decent choices enough of the time, democracy works. The free market is just democracy, but with money instead of votes.
In both cases government has a role. I think governments should add in longer term costs to the market, but in a way that preserves choice as much as possible (i.e. carbon taxes instead of carbon limits). I think governments should educate the population to increase the chances that they’ll make good decisions at the polls.
In the specific case of Microsoft, things were competitive until the government looked the other way WRT antitrust law. There’s a lot of shady stuff that happened in the first couple decades that Microsoft existed, yet they largely got a free pass.
All the big corps get a free pass because of money and power, and this is why free market doesn’t work.
Democracy doesn’t work either since media is owned by big corps as well. People can only know what they are allowed to know. If you are rich and powerful, you manipulate the media and you manipulate entire elections and decisions.
After a while, you actually see how all these systems are manipulated dally.
the problem is that not enough people make “good decisions”, partly because of how exhausting and time-consuming it is to carefully analyze and consider all the options for every facet of life. for example, there are lots of people who don’t want to switch to linux because they think its tedious to pick a distro, learn a new operating system, and find replacements/workarounds for software that doesn’t work out of the box on linux. now imagine having to do that for every single aspect of life. how do you pick your toothpaste and deodorant? do you carefully examine all the options each time you go to the store, or do you have a brand you pick without thinking about it because it works fine enough?
another problem with free markets is the inherent progression towards monopolies. this can be seen most readily with the so called natural monopolies (monopolies that emerge because of an extreme barrier to entry). how much choice do you have when it comes to your electricity provider? if they do something you don’t like, what can you do other than complain to a politician or move to a new region? aside from natural monopolies, we also see a progression towards monopolies because of inherent efficiencies of producing at scale.
there are other problems as well, such as corruption/lobbying, companies lying to the public, using psychology to manipulate people (link may not be the best source on the subject).
something that i personally find to be a great example of how the free market works in practice: rupert murdoch (among several others working at fox news) knew the 2020 election was not stolen, but pushed the narrative anyway because they didn’t want to upset their viewer base.
Linux with FUTURE WINE is your solution
future wine is just the future versions of wine, specifically the one that will be perfectly able to run windows programs
Eh, I only use WINE to run games, I’ve been able to use native Linux stuff for everything else.
Listen, I want to give the above a shot (It’s an idea I’ve had for a while) but it doesn’t just happen, it’s very very far from easy, and obnoxiously expensive. Might be cheaper and easier to get to the Moon than to tear down M$’ monopoly at this point.
MS screwing us with software. Apple screwing us with hardware upgrades. Linux out there taking all survivors
Linux suffers from being a patchwork of hobbyists updates, corporate additions, and patchy distro support. When it comes down to it, if you have an issue, you either have to solve it on your own or hope and pray the elitists on StackOverflow are in a good mood.
Honestly, every OS kinda sucks.
“Patchwork” sounds like a good way to describe Windows as well. Or at least it was when I was a Windows 10 sysadmin and there were two different settings menus to do everything.
Apple and Microsoft support aren’t exactly awesome, either, unless you’re a big business with deep pockets. At least with Linux, the system is open, so if there is a way to solve my problem, someone has almost certainly found it already and added it to Arch Wiki or Stack Overflow or something.
Broadly: Constructing their hardware so it’s impossible to repair or upgrade by anyone but them (or at all), then lobbying against any attempts to legislate the ‘right to repair’.
Check out the work of Louis Rossmann for details.
Oh I thought this was something new they were doing. Same old shit they’ve always been up to. Got it
They actually support right to repair laws. The joke is that they will make their hardware so difficult to repair that they are the only ones who can do it.
Now having Linux install in my machine, I don’t have to deal with wins bs ever again. It’s great that I made the right decision 5y ago
High time for another antitrust, huh
That’s the problem
- they are making harder to change the default browser on windows, and broke workaround by chrome and firefox too.
- they don’t let you uninstall edge in easy way or without a third party software.
- if you download another browser from edge they try to persuade you in to giving edge a try.
- they are planning to set edge as the default browser on teams.
- they don’t give you an easy way to open with another browser the internet result from the windows search bar, they broke EdgeDeflector many times indeed.
And nobody is doing something about it!
You know that’s a fuck up situation when you need to hope that a government union will give a fuck about a tech giant throwing shit at their paying customers
“We are aware of these reports and have paused this notification while we investigate and take appropriate action to address this unintended behavior,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications
“”“unintended”“”?
How do you implement shit like this by mistake and push it out to be executed on people’s computers by mistake?
