Percentage of market share is not a clear indication of monopoly. From what I could find, 50% is typically the bare minimum to warrant consideration, and 70 - 75% will get more serious scrutiny. Also, it differs from country to country. In the UK, Tesco was investigated even though it had a market share of only 30%.
I also recall reading one of the EU's regulators (was it Joaquin Almunia?) say that (paraphrasing) "we start sniffing around when any one party gets a market share north of 60%." Unfortunately, I cannot find that article.
>Percentage of market share is not a clear indication of monopoly
True, and the reason is that a 30% UK-wide or a 50% Europe-wide market share can easily turn out to be a 100% market share in many local markets. Tesco defended itself by saying that 98% of consumers have access to five different super market chains within a drive time radius of 30 minutes. Make that a more realistic 10 minutes and the picture changes dramatically.
Let's imagine a hypothetical world where Company A owns 80% of the smartphone market and the rest is divided between the also-rans.
Now imagine that app developers can't profitably make a 1st rate app without getting the income from company A's app store (But can port the app to other OSes for extra income). If company A starts to use this situation to make it harder to port apps to other companies OSes via strongarm tactics, then company A is abusing its monopoly position of being the only profitable way to make an app.
Today's world is nothing like that, but it's an example of how near-total marketshare is not necessary for anti-trust to come into play. There is a certain point at which you have a large enough market share, that certain other players in the market must deal with you to get the volume needed to compete, particularly in high-volume, high-upfront cost industries (which many types of software qualify as).
Monopoly is not antitrust. Abusing control of a market is. A monopoly (which is usually considered to be dominance if a market place) is not itself unlawful.
"This makes life extremely difficult for the only company brazen enough to sell an Android fork in the west: Amazon. Since the Kindle OS counts as an incompatible version of Android, no major OEM is allowed to produce the Kindle Fire for Amazon. So when Amazon goes shopping for a manufacturer for its next tablet, it has to immediately cross Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE off the list. Currently, Amazon contracts Kindle manufacturing out to Quanta Computer, a company primarily known for making laptops. Amazon probably doesn't have many other choices"
Yeah, that's a serious problem for me, essentially using their leverage with the Google platform to keep competitors out of the market. Not cool Google.
Antitrust laws exist to enable greater competition by stopping businesses behaving in an anticompetative manner. They don't necessarily exist for "policing monoploies" anywhere in the world.
>"and it is such legislation which I consider bunk"
Why? Don't you think that Microsoft should have been reprimanded over their abuse of the OS market to gain control of the browser market?
Or is it because it's being held over $favorite_faceless_corp like the proverbial sword of Damocles?
To be fair, Microsoft also created a browser that, for its time, is pretty widely accepted (even around here!) as being much better than the Netscape counterpart. So while they did throw their weight around, it's not clear that their browser dominance was purely because of their OS monopoly. There were many other ways that Microsoft was leveraging its monopoly which deserved antitrust scrutiny, but I think bundling a browser was the wrong thing to be prosecuted for.
I agree totally that IE 4 was a browser ahead of it's time, however Microsoft were shown to have needlesly integrated it into their OS and then told OEMs that their Windows licenses would be revoked if they sold PC with Navigator pre-installed. I'd say they were lucky not to be broken up!
The problem there was that Microsoft had already signed a consent decree with Janet Reno's DoJ which specifically allowed them to expand the OS but forbade them from tying.
However, Microsoft also rewrote IE into componentized form, so that components (eg the rendering engine) could be used by other applications, including third-party programs. This was considered a Good Thing at the time (it won the deal with AOL, for example) and made integration (as opposed to tying) a reasonable claim. This is, of course, independent of the way Microsoft handled the argument in court, which was very, very badly.
In sum, whatever Microsoft did was not independent of the actions of the US government, whose interference had extremely bad results for consumers. This includes the crapware explosion that resulted from the DoJ's removal of Microsoft's power over OEMs.
As history showed, there wasn't even an MS monopoly in existence. OSX became viable in the early oughts, Linux was always around, and now people write of the death of the PC.
Regardless, abuse of market dominance (note I don't use the overused 'M' word) increases incentives for competitors to enter the marketplace.
It's got nothing to do with monopoly!!! Apple or Linux have nothing to do with it; the ruling being for behaviour in the period that preceded 2000. Microsoft were in a dominant position in one market and leveraged this dominace to gain dominance in another. This is anti-competative. for the final time; a monopoly is not illeagal in and of itself, neither is it antitrust.
I once saw an economics paper finding that if the top four players in a given market have more than 60% marketshare between them, they'll naturally act as a cartel. Ergo preserving an effective free market for consumers requires preventing that circumstance.
That depends on how the market share of revenue looks as well, and to my knowledge the percentage of revenue Apple receives is not dropping nearly as fast (and Google's not the main competitor there, Samsung is, even if it's using Google software).
This is an opportunity for Yahoo. The article mentions that OEMs can't leave because they're afraid of losing Google services, Yahoo can be that replacement. They've been making beautiful mobile apps lately and they have some very polished services. They are a pure play service provider who isn't trying to compete with the OEMs; they have no conflict of interest.
If you work at Yahoo, this is something you should run up the chain. A relationship with OEMs would solve their problems, and allow you to get a foothold in mobile that you haven't been able to before.
Open always wins, until it conflicts with your business interests. "Open" used to be the oft-repeated advantage over iOS in the early days, I wonder if that will slip away from the narrative like "SD card slots", "removable batteries", and "real keyboard" did.
I don't see Google making any rules about OEMs not being allowed to manufacture devices with micro SD slots, removable batteries or physical keyboards. Just because Google doesn't want to spend its R&D money on those features doesn't mean they're stopping anyone else who uses Android.
History doesn't really support this. Even Linux had to get some corporate backing (initially Red Hat, Suse, and the like), and later Canonical and others before it really took off.
Open source has proven to be a long term survivor, but not a winner.
I was going to say, "well, most people aren't actually using a corporate-sponsored distro", but I guess the real question is whether Linux would have become the impressive piece of technology it is today without corporate backing, if there had never been anyone working on it full-time. Maybe FreeBSD would have taken it's place if Linus didn't have enough time to work on it. Either way, it's really hard for me to imagine a non-open system in this position of dominance.
Does it matter? Corporations adopted Linux because of it's openness, and Linux is winning in those areas because of corporations who adopted it because of....
Open doesn't mean 'hobbyist', it merely refers to the freedoms enabled by the code's license...
They adapted it because it was cheaper, not because it was open. Now, open frequently tends to be cheaper, but not always, it isn't an inherent quality of openness.
IBM and Oracle both have in-house operating systems (AIX, z/OS, Solaris), and are both big enough that they have, for all practical purposes, unlimited resources.
Yet both use and push Linux, IBM uses SUSE Enterprise, and Oracle forked Red Hat's OS...
I really doubt either cared about whatever marginal cost they may or may not save. Linux's openness is kind of like natural selection - good features live on, bad ones die.
Open source does make better software (everything else being equal of course).
They gained share on Android last quarter, which doesn't include their newly launched phones. Horace Dediu raised the idea that Android has peaked in the US a few months ago, and the latest numbers seem to back him up.
