Re:Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust laws...
by shadowgovt on Friday May 15, 2020 @09:22PM
(#23199547)
I was pulling a salary from one of those companies when that lawsuit went through about wage suppression, and I can tell you, my wage sure didn't feel suppressed.
Always felt a little gross to me that people who make six figures would claim their wages were being held down. It's not like anyone who felt they were underpaid or underappreciated didn't know where the other companies were. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it and cashed my check for being apparently a part of an oppressed class, but at the end of the day very little changed and the biggest beneficiaries of the entire exercise were the lawyers who got the lion's share of the suit money.
On the topic of monarchies, there was plenty of creative destruction during the monarchy era. Territories and kingdoms were constantly being built, defended, fought over, carved up, destroyed, and rebuilt. Not all churn is good churn.
I'm certainly not against new companies innovating and creating new things. But I'm not sure in the specific space of software engineering, we need the heavy hand of government cracking up a successful company to enable creation of good things. I don't think the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit was a good idea, and it looks like history has borne that out; Apple got themselves out of their own hole by finding another operating system route separate from Windows and rearchitecting themselves on top of it, and Mozilla would always have had a home on Linux that Windows couldn't touch one way or the other. In the long run, all the lawsuit really seems to have done is force Microsoft into a back seat in they have arbitrary restrictions on the way they are allowed to combine their browser and operating system resources, and who benefits from that? Chrome has written an OS and a browser combined, why isn't Microsoft allowed to?
Better software tends to speak for itself. Do we trust government to make these decisions for the people who understand the technology and the people who use it?
Always felt a little gross to me that people who make six figures would claim their wages were being held down. It's not like anyone who felt they were underpaid or underappreciated didn't know where the other companies were. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it and cashed my check for being apparently a part of an oppressed class, but at the end of the day very little changed and the biggest beneficiaries of the entire exercise were the lawyers who got the lion's share of the suit money.
On the topic of monarchies, there was plenty of creative destruction during the monarchy era. Territories and kingdoms were constantly being built, defended, fought over, carved up, destroyed, and rebuilt. Not all churn is good churn.
I'm certainly not against new companies innovating and creating new things. But I'm not sure in the specific space of software engineering, we need the heavy hand of government cracking up a successful company to enable creation of good things. I don't think the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit was a good idea, and it looks like history has borne that out; Apple got themselves out of their own hole by finding another operating system route separate from Windows and rearchitecting themselves on top of it, and Mozilla would always have had a home on Linux that Windows couldn't touch one way or the other. In the long run, all the lawsuit really seems to have done is force Microsoft into a back seat in they have arbitrary restrictions on the way they are allowed to combine their browser and operating system resources, and who benefits from that? Chrome has written an OS and a browser combined, why isn't Microsoft allowed to?
Better software tends to speak for itself. Do we trust government to make these decisions for the people who understand the technology and the people who use it?