Ya keep telling yourself that. No coercion as in none at all? I would say there is some coercion. If Microsoft was really the saint you say they are they would have made all their products save copies to open source formats. Not .doc .xls .ppt etc..... They did that for a reason.
Bundles are not discounts. Bundles are two or more products sold together.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_(marketing) Discounts are Discounts. You can give one on any product. Even one product...
Sometimes there are natural reasons for bundling like cellular phones and service. But bundling in a monopolistic industry is an intrusion to competition in my opinion.
Microsoft did this to create a standard. I can understand this, but dont think Microsoft did this to benefit anyone but themselves and their shareholders. The reason the internet is so big is because Microsoft did not understand it and get their hands on it first.
.html is an open source and most successful standards that have truly helped people have been open source.
What's your point? Are you against more products for one, cheaper price (or DISCOUNTS)? Again, nobody was forced to buy Microsoft products, there have been, there are, and there always will be competitors to Microsoft. The reason Microsoft was so successful was because they created a product consumers liked.
Is there anything wrong with that? Why should anti-trust laws
Microsoft has only relaxed some strangles they were putting on systems because of legislation. Not because of some concern for the consumer.
Really, what you're talking about is a problem with government granted monopolies, eg intellectual "property," and not anything to do with the free market.
LOL - Abolish one of the last bastions of American ingenuity? Intellectual Property? Why would I want to support that? Besides if little copyright enforcement helped spur IP development China would be designing all our software and France would still be in the Pharmaceutical business. Since the patents left, the French Pharma companies stopped researching drugs. No incentive....
Maybe you forgot about this little thing called competition. If you're a big Pharma company of course you don't want intellectual property to be abolished because smaller businesses will then compete with you.
Why do you think ibuprofen, a chemical only found in certain trees in the South American jungle, is so cheap? Because where no government monopolies exist the price system is allowed to work as normal, when prices are high producers have an incentive to produce more driving prices down. But in a gov't enforced monopoly situation there is no such thing as it is in the interest of a single controlling company to keep supply low and prices high.
Also, you really need to provide a source.
I don't believe people prefer Coca Cola because of a superior product or some economy of scale you talk about. Whenever I go shopping Coke costs the same or more as everything else.
You're obviously not getting something:
People buy Coca Cola because they value coke more than other drinks. You don't buy coke if you like pepsi more. You don't buy Coke or Pepsi if you like Dr. Pepper more. You don't buy Coke, Pepsi, or Dr. Pepper more if you like Mott's Apple Juice more.
Do you get it now?
It's about voluntary transactions and the freedom of choice. Why anyone would want to destroy Coca Cola or Pepsi and therefore driving the prices of those brands up and destroying the stocks of thousands of people, I have no clue.
Coca Cola sells because of marketing and distribution. If you had blind taste tests I could pick 20 beverages that I think taste better and could be sold retail at the same as Coca Cola. I think other people would do the same. But it would not be in the vending machine 20 feet away...
What a huge fallacy. You really think you know better than everyone else, don't you? You really think that
your values,
your preferences, and
your tastes are universal?
And if Coca Cola became #1 by advertising, then so what? You want to destroy their freedom of speech?
Most were medicinal. And why not just write it on the label? I don't think they ever did....O ya the stigma of being an addict.... You are imagining this demand. Do you have proof? Or were people simply addicted to one of the most addicting substances in the world and could buy it without going to a drug pusher?
Drugs used to be legal and cocaine quite popular as a medicine, you know, and many people knew when they were taking products with coca.
Here is a link, and as you can clearly see many of the medicines have coca listed either in their name or somewhere on them. Also, please note
Coca-Cola. It was no secret that there was cocaine in Coca-Cola, there's a reason the "coca" was in the name.
