If America is emerging as the dominant world force because of the cloud, should Seattle be the new capital?
Apparently a single juror held out for Microsoft’s side of the case.
Novel’s lawsuit against Microsoft’s monopoly over the word processing market has ended in a hung jury. Novel says it will continue the suit.
The big issue is not Microsoft’s tactics or Novell’s bad business model. Whether legal or not, the software/internet industry seems to evolve toward monopolies. Microsoft is not just the dominant player in office applications (the nub of the Novell complaint), Microsoft has a monopoly.
Microsoft, however, is not alone. Amazon seems headed in the same direction. Their website dominates on-line retail to the point that I now find it hard to buy anything w/o at least shopping on my Kindle Fire, accessing Amazon on my Droid, or browsing their “store” from my desktop.
Apple, eBay, Wal-Mart seem to be fighting for their piece of the pie, but competing with Amazon may be getting to be impossible. The emerging Amazon monopoly is not because they have the best prices but because any competitor would have to spend vast sums of money, at little early income, to reproduce Amazon’s mixture of software, database, warehouses, and processor farms. For many smaller companies, their businesses now depend on being on marketing via Amazon.
Currently another such fight is underway … the fight to “own” the cloud. Owning the cloud will require owning enough of the desktop, TV or phone space so that users must come to the cloud through you. A search engine is needed as well since we now know that search is a necessary tool of the internet. Processor farms are the third asset …. the cloud needs a place to live. There seem to be three players who meet all of these: Microsoft, Google, Amazon., and Apple.
Fantasy? Imagine Microsoft buying Comcast or Apple buying Amazon. These hard to imagine fantasies are probably as legal nder our anti-trust laws as Microsoft bundling Word into Office.
A bigger threat might be China buying Google or putting together its own Google out of some mix of smaller players like Yahoo, Sony, and AT&T. Why would China do this?
China must find the war in the clouds frightening. Past wars have been fought over dominance of the land. Rome, the Aztecs, the Incas, China, the USA each won their own piece of the globe not just by military conquest but by building roads and canals. England was the first empire to extend this model to the entire world. With a mix of trading companies, colonies, .the royal navy and a vast fleet of merchant vessels. Great Britain ruled the world. America … with help from Hitler … displaced Britain.
If Britain ruled the seas, America may be emerging as the ruler of the cloud.