Sometimes the best way for an industry to learn a lesson is for one of the competitors to make a bonehead move and get run out of business. In this particular case I am quite sure that the lesson has been learned. Hosting companies and registrars aren't going to want to have even the slightest exposure to SOPA. What's more, the sharper ones are probably firing up marketing campaigns designed specifically to appeal to GoDaddy customers that are uneasy about SOPA. After all, GoDaddy's repentance might well just be skin deep.

GoDaddy has plenty of money and influence, and a whole pile of talented employees. If the company is *truly* committed to its new course surely it can find a way to demonstrate their commitment that is more tangible than just a web page. If it can't come up with a way to show its newfound wisdom, or if it wants to sit on the fence for a bit then its customers should continue to jump ship. That will *certainly* get the message across.

"Voting with your dollars" implies running companies out of business. That's the whole point.

There is a little company called Red Hat, perhaps you have heard of them. Their competitors have had a distinct habit of taking their Free Software and adding a few pieces of proprietary code. These additions generally made the competition nicer to use than Red Hat, but for whatever reason the competitors never were able to gain any significant market share.

Caldera, SuSE, Novell, and most recently Oracle have all taken a crack at Red Hat using software that was largely based on Red Hat's own distribution. So far this strategy has produced nothing but failure.

The Mexican citizenry should be glad that they haven't moved on to organ harvesting.

In other words, Microsoft's sells the same hardware as everyone else, but they mark up the price and remove all of the extras that other computer manufacturer's include for free.

Yes, I know that most of the extras that OEMs add to their computers are crapware, but try explaining that to your average consumer without mentioning that the trial version of MS Office (that probably ships on the Microsoft Signature version) also fits into the same boat.

My guess is that these stores simply drive people right into Apple's arms. Apple's ridiculous prices almost certainly seem less ridiculous when compared to Microsoft's premium prices. The fact of the matter is that most Windows users don't actually want to use Windows. They just can't quite justify buying a Mac. Jacking up the prices on PCs is not likely to help.

That's actually an excellent point. At that price point there is not a whole lot of wiggle room, although I would bet even Amazon would be willing to sweeten the deal on a $0.99 book for an author that had already sold 1 million copies of a $0.99 ebook.

Of course, the easiest way to get a larger percentage of the profits would be to simply charge more for the next book. Baen.com has an whole pile of books that they give away for FREE. It is very common for books these days to be part of a series, and at the very least many readers tend to become fans of a particular writer and purchase everything written by the author. The publishers know that if you like the free samples you are very likely to come back and *buy* more. If you are not an established writer what you really need are fans, not a bigger piece of a microscopic pie.

If you sell a million copies of a book, chances are very good that you can get a much higher percentage of the profits on the *next* book. The real problem that most authors face is that no one has any idea who they are. I've happily paid up to $20 for a pre-release copy of an ebook from an author that I enjoy in a series that I just *had* to finish. However, I started that series with a free ebook on Baen's website (The Belisaurius Series, in case you are interested).

Writing is no different from any other profession. While skill and talent are important, marketing trumps almost everything. Giving away a sample at a discount is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing play book.

Heck, the linked article even includes a set of charts showing where Netflix plans to lose customers. Yes, Netflix will lose 200K streaming only customers and 800K DVD only customers. On the other hand it expects to have roughly the same amount of users that use both services (12 million). The difference, of course, is that now these 12 million customers (roughly half of Netflix's users) will be paying twice as much as they were previously.

And somehow the idiots on Wall Street think that this is a *bad* sign. Netflix just doubled the revenue that it extracts from nearly half of its userbase. The cost to the company was less than 5% its userbase, and 8 out of 10 of the customers Netflix lost were the DVD-only customers that are more expensive to service anyhow.

It almost makes me want to rush out and buy stock in Netflix tomorrow. Eventually the boneheads that do financial reporting are going to do the the math, and realize that the folks running Netflix are *much* smarter than they are.

Microsoft has no choice but to compete on merit at this point. They have already tried to lock people in with Silverlight, but they did not get any takers. Heck, even with Microsoft working on its browser as hard as it can it is still shedding millions of users each month.

The HTML5/CSS apps will likely have to wait for Google and Mozilla to port their web browsers to Windows/Arm. Internet Explorer on Arm is not likely to be a compelling choice for applications that rely heavily on the web browser.

It used to be that the embedded marketplace was full of odd hardware with its own oddball C compiler. These days you wouldn't touch a platform with a ten foot pole that didn't have a port of gcc. Likewise, there was a time, back when Posix was fairly new, when it was not clear that Posix was going to become an important standard. Part of the reason that it succeeded was that GNU decided to emulate it. However, it did not do so slavishly. For interesting reading Google for POSIX_ME_HARDER, for some examples of cases where GNU software is not Posix-compatible on purpose.

I do agree that the Free Software people are not trying to be mean, but the exact same things happen when Free Software becomes ubiquitous as when proprietary software becomes ubiquitous. Alternative software that does mostly the same thing gets crowded out of the market.

Linux's success makes it hard for the BSDs to gain traction. GNU's implementation of Posix tools makes it hard for non-Posix systems to gain traction, etc.

It would appear that Brett Glass is running lariat.net. I sort of miss him too.

That being the case, gcc is a good case of a Free Software project becoming ubiquitous enough that it begins to extinguish the chances of other projects--even other Free Software projects. Likewise Linux itself makes it difficult for other Free Software kernels, and GNU makes it difficult to write a non-Posix userspace.

Microsoft only extinguishes competition in that its products become ubiquitous. You can still purchase WordPerfect, but if you send people WordPerfect files, you are likely to get complaints. The exact same thing when Free Software projects become ubiquitous, alternatives start to become somewhat unworkable due to network effects.

Now, it certainly is true that Microsoft is unique in that it actively tries to subvert and sabotage standards, and Free Software doesn't generally do this, but there are cases where Free Software deliberately breaks standards compatibility. For an amusing example google the case of df and du and POSIX_ME_HARDER. I am not sure what df or du output on Solaris or another commercial UNIX but I would be surprised if they used 512 byte blocks, whatever Posix might specify. I wouldn't know though. I primarily use Linux.

Once upon a time there was a much larger market for compilers than there is today. To a very large extent gcc has sucked the air out of the room. Even clang, its relatively new Free Software competition has to support a lot of gcc-isms, because quite a bit of real life software these days assumes it is going to be compiled by gcc.

This doesn't seem nearly as bad as what Microsoft tends to do to, because it comes complete with source code, and the incompatibilities are *probably* not intentional, as Microsoft's failures to follow standards typical are. Still, there certainly are cases where GNU software uses its market share to help it compete.

I would bet that Silverlight developers that have invested time and energy into the platform feel differently. Unlike a Free Software platform Silverlight developers can not extend Silverlight on their own. If Microsoft fails to invest in the platform, then the platform will stagnate, and eventually it will die. Sure, existing Silverlight applications will still work (for a while anyway). However, no one in their right mind is going to start new Silverlight development at this point, and those people that did jump on the Silverlight bandwagon are probably going to have to port their applications to a new platform. Silverlight developers are going to have to update their skills (and their resume).

Nice graph. Thanks.