The benefits of competition
It has been clear that the existence of AMD as a viable competitor for Intel has meant that the consumer gets better prices and more innovation in the area of CPUs. It is very likely that if Intel had the same sort of monopoly that Microsoft has, PCs would be slower and more expensive.
I think the lack of competion shows in Windows. For one thing the cost of a full version of Windows XP is a big fraction of the total cost of many PCs. There is no way to know exactly how much better and cheaper Windows would be if there were any real competition but clearly there would have been an effect. A hint about what some real competition for Windows might do is given by Bill Gate’s recent announcement that Internet Explorer would get updated much more often. After letting Internet Explorer 6 languish for years without any update except security patches, Microsoft is feeling the heat from Firefox and we are going to get better browsers as a result. That is what competition does for you.
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