Re: In God We Antitrust, from the Netly News

[Ryan Anderson <ryan@michonline.com>]

On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, Tim May wrote:

> The next such battle will be about Intel, which, if anything, has even more
> of a commanding presence in the market than MS has. Besides
> "investigations" (a DC codeword meaning: "donate money to the ruling
> party"), the antitrust buzz is that the Intel-DEC deal may be scotched.
> 
> Intel's failed competitors (Cyrix, AMD, Motorola, Sun, SGI/MIPS,
> Intergraph) can be counted on to run crying to Mother Government, crying
> that Intel is too successful.

Failed? AMD is farfrom a failed competitor.  Intel is nowhere near being a
monopoly.  In this industry,Intel creates a chip, then AMD,Cyrix, etc take
the published specs on that chip and duplicate the work.  They same some
effort from having to make opcode decisions, but then they don't get first
crack at the market.  AMD has a *Very* good chip in the K6, receiving much
attention as being a serious competitor to Intel's chips.

Intel is in no way nearly as hated as Microsoft.  Many people hate MS
products irrationally, some of those also hate the 80x86line of chips.
The number hating the chips is muhc lower than the number hating MS.
Maybe because Intel tends to have more reliable produts?  Who knows. 

Intel is *not* in any danger of being a target for an antitrust suit in
the near futur, in truth they don't even have the signs going for them.
(No dumping of products, no tying of products, though Slot-1 might
cqualify as this, I doubt it.)

Even the industry mags point out this difference between the two.  It's a
lot easier to develop competing hardware than a competing OS.  

Ryan Anderson - Alpha Geek
PGP fp: 7E 8E C6 54 96 AC D9 57  E4 F8 AE 9C 10 7E 78 C9
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