Not even close.

It was HIS operating system. He developed it.

Gasoline is a natural product.

There were other operating systems out there.

What people did not like was the way he marketed it.

For whatever reason you don't like Bill Gates, you have to admit he changed the face of the planet where computers are concerned.

He gave away his operating system to the public by having them installed in computers when you buy the computer.

If he had not done this, you would have to had to buy a computer and then buy an operating system and then get someone to install it for you and all of this would be extra cost.

He wanted his operating system in all computers so people would have to buy his software.

Business is business.

Absolutely and a great example of a natural monopoly. The first one to hit the market has the monopoly until someone else enters the game.

And you are right about cheaper products. I always buy cheap Asian made DVD players, because they support more formats. It makes it easy to download a video and burn it to DVD, when you don't have to worry about converting the file or putting it into a series of folders. Just burn it on there and most Asian DVD players will play it.

Wow, I missed that comment. Yeah, JB is right. Microsoft is a natural monopoly in that they control the market share of the OS market, but nothing they did was illegal in US terms. The anti-trust lawsuit against them was a witch hunt. Eventually, they had to make their APIs available to 3rd party developers, which was unfair. They created the APIs for their own use, I don't see why they should be forced to share them with others. It's like forcing a band to share their beats with others.

I complain about it being unfair, but I use their APIs anyways. They are great and make programming a lot easier. The new Windows 7 APIs have some really neat stuff that I can't wait to check out.

nope. a monopoly has nothing to do with whose first. a monopoly is only a monopoly if it can control the market and keep compitition out. apple has had an operating system for as long as microsoft has and sells a great many of them and competes quite profitably in a highly competitive market. now microsoft has many competitors for many of it's applications. we simply will not agree on what a monopoly is so i'll leave the exchange with that. as you have in the past with me and others you'll likely attack my research ability with more suggested reading and such but such debate tactics are never effective so i'll disregard it as coming from one who would comment on such about a person he knows nothing about. judgement happens alot in these forums.

That's not how a natural monopoly acts. You are still stuck on coercive monopolies as being the only kind.

I don't need to give you any more links, the ones I gave you cover the subject very well.

Well I pretty much got the answers I expected for this thread.

I wonder if I posed this question in a Russian or Chinese thread what kind of answers I would receive and what reasons would they be.

Well perhaps one day I can do this. Afterall, I am studying Mandarin for a good 2 years now. It will be interesting to see different opinions and dialogues on the subject.

I think there is an factor that is often downplayed, or even completely ignored, by the "share the wealth" proponents.

Doesn't the employment of poor people in fact provide wealth where there would otherwise be none? Doesn't the very construction and operation of the factories infuse wealth into the communities where they are constructed and operated?

In other words, are not those poor people better off than they would have been without the corporations?

So if one is going to talk about "greed", then ignoring the greed of the workers ("we want more") and only focusing on the greed of the management ("we want more"), is taking a one-sided view of the whole issue.

Guns don't kill people. People kill people.
Capitalism doesn't oppress people. People oppress people.
Religion doesn't hurt people. People hurt people.

The problem is people. Not the systems and not the weapons. People.

You all can quote me on that.