The Dawn Of Monopoly And Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system in which property is owned by private persons and operated for profit. When monopoly (pure oligopoly exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it) gains power over the capitalistic economic system and world market, than we have a problem. This problem is already present at the technological world market.

In this article, I will try to point out how capitalism and especially monopoly, can change the world to worse.

Of course, as you may expect, the first major technical corporation that we will mention will be the Microsoft Corporation. The company was recently judged for world market monopoly and Bill Gates retired as well (although he retired, we don’t really expect that he will have less power over the company, based on the assumption that he still surely owns more than 70% of the company). Some people think that Bill Gates is something like a hero, because he made one the largest corporations on the planet from his garage, but he isn’t at all.

Real capitalism is never nice for all the people in the world. You basically can not make a company that is that large, without harming someone. The monopoly is a great problem in the world market. The Microsoft Corporation concluded that many contracts (with their computer software and operating systems) with other companies, that provide and make computer hardware, that it is basically in more than 80% of the supply in the world market impossible to buy a computer, without buying the computer software from the Microsoft Corporation (for example the Windows operating system, family NT).

Many companies steal ideas from others so they can be more competitive at the market. A practical example is the Apple Incorporation. They stole ideas from the Xerox Corporation’s computer laboratory and used them for their own one. Many users (“believers”) of the Apple company say that this is the only argument against the company, but this is not true as well. First of all, the Apple company did not create the operating system kernel them selves, but they simply used it from the operating system of the family BSD (the Berkeley Software Distribution), that was and still is a free computer software. Can you image that? Hundreds of people around the world are developing an operating system, than a company takes the operating system kernel and uses it for their own operating system that is not a free computer software. No, it is not against the law, but it is simply very unethical. Of course we are not at the end of the beautiful list. The Apple company has (as all people know) very expensive computers. Is that a problem, you might ask yourself? A user may now think, that every buyer can buy what he wants, but this is not the whole truth. The supply of the Apple Incorporation on the market is simply deceptive. So, the company is deceiving buyers, because the relationship between the supply and the market price has a big gap. There are other problems in the Macintosh operating system as well, like for example the user unfriendly computer software, et cetera. Of course issues with computer software execution time and so on.

So, where does the average user see the monopoly of the Microsoft Corporation? Well, its basically like an example with the milk and the bread. Because the provider company of the milk and the provider company of the bread concluded a contract you will have to buy the bread as well if you want to buy the milk. Is this good? Yes, for some people that want always bread with their milk is it alright, but not all people want that. Some people would just simply like to buy milk (a computer without the software) and they can’t. That is the monopoly. Other companies at the market just do not have the chance to make these contracts with the companies, so that people would have more choice what exactly to buy. They basically farce the purchase and that is absolutely not right!

(Image sources from the Discovery Education, Handcuffs and Satterth HTTP servers.)

- שָׁלוֹם ולהתראות ,לוקה

Copyright © 2008 by Luka Woititz