Defiant Psystar plays monopoly card as it resumes selling unauthorized ‘Mac clones’
April 16th, 2008 | by Tony Steidler-Dennison |(Via MacDailyNews.)
“Psystar is back online selling ‘white-box’ Macs with a few subtle changes, and one employee has already played the monopoly card,” Tom Krazit writes for CNET.
“Since they brought it up, let’s review the basic definition of a monopoly, shall we? And remember, there’s nothing illegal about having a monopoly, it’s only when you use that monopoly for nefarious purposes do you get pinched,” Krazit writes.
MacDailyNews Take: Thank Jobs that somebody else is out there explaining that a monopoly is not illegal, but abusing it is. Right, Microsoft?
Krazit continues, “The business section of Answers.com says, ‘A monopoly is a market condition in which a single seller controls the entire output of a particular good or service. A firm is a monopoly if it is the sole seller of its product and if its product has no close substitutes. Close substitutes are those goods that could closely take the place of a particular good; for example, a Pepsi soft drink would be a close substitute for a Coke drink, but a juice drink would not.’”
“Debate the aesthetics all you want, but I’d argue that Windows and Linux are, for the purposes of personal computing, close substitutes to Mac OS X. They can run a personal computer. They can connect you to the Internet. They can run a basic suite of productivity applications,” Krazit writes. “You may prefer Mac OS X for a variety of reasons, but Apple’s requirement that you can only run Mac OS X on Apple hardware doesn’t prevent you from using a personal computer.”
Full story here.
