I've been reading these discussions for a while now and would like to chime in with my 2 cents.
Let's say you're the president of Hewlett Packard and you're trying to find a way to beat out Dell for market share. The only thing that really makes Dell computers stand out from HP computers is price. After all, Dell computers run Windows too. So you gather your board members for a meeting about this and someone asks, "Why don't we make a better operating system to compete with Dell?"
You say, "Great idea! Let's design an operating system that's better than Windows." So you and your team of engineers spend billions and billions designing a new operating system from scratch. It's ten years ahead of it's time. It a 128-bit operating system and it's does computations five times as fast as Windows. Your built in security software is bullet proof and as a result, HP computers sell like hot cakes.
A few months later, HP is the market leader, but Dell steps in and says, "Hey, wait a minute. This isn't fair. HP is competing with us. How dare they! They can't make their own operating system. They have to license it."
A court steps in and says, "Hey, license your operating system to Dell." You, as CEO of the company, look up at the judge and say, "Hey, wait a second judge, we spent BILLIONS of dollars making this operating system and spend millions more maintaining it. Dell didn't lift a finger. Now you're telling me we HAVE TO license them our new software?"
The judge brings down his gavel and says, "Yes," but instead of licensing the operating system, you say "screw it. If we have to license every OS we write, what's the use of writing it when we're just going to have to give it away, for far less than we would make on hardware? We're just doing cheap R&D for Dell so that they can turn around and beat us in the market again. Why should HP do that if we can continue to license Windows for twenty dollars a copy?"
As a result, there's no innovation in the market. Everyone continues to use Windows because it's cheaper than developing their own operating system and then giving it away. Does that seem fair to anybody?
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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I've been reading these discussions for a while now and would like to chime in with my 2 cents.
Let's say you're the president of Hewlett Packard and you're trying to find a way to beat out Dell for market share. The only thing that really makes Dell computers stand out from HP computers is price. After all, Dell computers run Windows too. So you gather your board members for a meeting about this and someone asks, "Why don't we make a better operating system to compete with Dell?"
You say, "Great idea! Let's design an operating system that's better than Windows." So you and your team of engineers spend billions and billions designing a new operating system from scratch. It's ten years ahead of it's time. It a 128-bit operating system and it's does computations five times as fast as Windows. Your built in security software is bullet proof and as a result, HP computers sell like hot cakes.
A few months later, HP is the market leader, but Dell steps in and says, "Hey, wait a minute. This isn't fair. HP is competing with us. How dare they! They can't make their own operating system. They have to license it."
A court steps in and says, "Hey, license your operating system to Dell." You, as CEO of the company, look up at the judge and say, "Hey, wait a second judge, we spent BILLIONS of dollars making this operating system and spend millions more maintaining it. Dell didn't lift a finger. Now you're telling me we HAVE TO license them our new software?"
The judge brings down his gavel and says, "Yes," but instead of licensing the operating system, you say "screw it. If we have to license every OS we write, what's the use of writing it when we're just going to have to give it away, for far less than we would make on hardware? We're just doing cheap R&D for Dell so that they can turn around and beat us in the market again. Why should HP do that if we can continue to license Windows for twenty dollars a copy?"
As a result, there's no innovation in the market. Everyone continues to use Windows because it's cheaper than developing their own operating system and then giving it away. Does that seem fair to anybody?