Posts by Staberinde 7 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Dec 2011
A shame the Right seems to have a monopoly on economic comment pieces on The Reg these days...
However I'm afraid your thesis ignores the huge barriers to entry Google and its brethren shelter behind. Like paying minimal tax, which a British competitor would struggle to achieve. Or having a massive war chest with which to acquire competitors with better people and ideas.
Capitalism is supposed to be about a constant churn of creative destruction and fierce competition where no company gets to be dominant for long. Yet your assumption seems to be that tech is a special case where global economies of scale lead to inevitable monopoly or oligopoly and that we should simply accept it. There'll always be a Microsoft at top until a Google supplants them; the market dominance is the same but the logo is different.
Doesn't it worry you as a good capitalist that business owners are able to extract such huge profits from companies on a 10 year dominance cycle? Aren't you disturbed that Google's business model is to monetise user data for which they receive software-in-kind in a value exchange entirely determined by the supplier rather than the consumer? Or that Google freerides on the infrastructure of the telcos in a way that it doesn't allow app developers to do with its own ecosystem?
I don't think Adam Smith would back your arguments.
Please read Jaron Lanier and come back with a proper capitalist analysis rather than an ode to rent-seeking.
Tim's a fairly decent op-ed writer, but his continued presence on a tech site talking about vaguely scientific things as a fig-leaf for Right-wing propaganda seems strange. Now I like a bit of this stuff as much as the next guy, but where are the alternative voices in Vulture op-ed pieces?
Very slick site, but isn't 'speed to lead' something Tata Communications have been saying for, oh, a while now?
Case in point: http://formula1.tatacommunications.com
You'd hope EMC's marketing dolts would have cottoned-on, if, you know, they'd actually been to a GP anytime in the last 18 months...
Paris, for creativity.
Why did / do I download copyrighted material without paying? The answers:
* I wanted one song, not a whole album, and this was not available for individual purchase at the time [this is rarely the case now].
* I already owned the CD and couldn't be bothered ripping it myself.
* I wanted to watch an old TV show like Wild Palms, that wasn't available on DVD at the time.
* I wanted to watch the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica, but it wouldn't be available in the UK for months, and even then only on Sky (which I don't subscribe to). Ages later, when it arrived on DVD, I bought them all.
So for me, illegal downloading was and is largely a question of availability. When the AV I want to consume isn't available at the time and in the format I want, a torrent fills the void.
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