betasam's Journal: Antitrust . Intel

Everyone knew this was coming sooner or later; and it seems AMD has finally taken the initiative to file Antitrust against their 'unfair' competitors - Intel.

Any business player who seems to gain a significant market advantage tends to use that advantage (fair or foul) to retain the market. This seems to work as simple as the owner of high ground would rather hold it (in the military sense) no matter what their strengths (numbers, technology or warrant.) I was hoping to see Intel (who labeled themselves 'The Paranoid') brought to trial for antitrust as soon as Microsoft was pulled up. The Wintel alliance, being the one which gave them the high ground in the first place (despite all chance that caused it.)

Reading "Inside Intel" by Tim Jackson, I learnt that AMD were just 9 months behind Intel with a similar business model. The big break into the global market, becoming the "chosen ones" by IBM (like Microsoft.) In the 48 pager (27-Jun-2005) from AMD, you read the usual story: "coercion" on OEMs, retailers, Hardware vendors to retain their higher MDFs and "threats" to refuse to supply on cooperation with the competitor.

Well, this ultimately DENIES the consumer of having 'reasonable' choice and the ability to choose a better performing product. I resorted to a Pentium4HT desktop, coz I couldn't find enough motherboard choices to hold a nice AMD64 (most had been coerced to be 'Intel compatible.')

Thinking of it, Socialism/Communism where the Government runs companies that have all market share and become monopolies operate similarly. They have no need to provide customer service on demand as there's no one else. Capitalism was supposed to provide a competitive environment where the consumer profited by choice, competition and assured growth. Monopolies violating this spirit inside a capitalist world are merely appeasing communism and are against the very spirit that created them.

Being a techie, I notice that Intel's compiler (which comes from an acquired company, Kai?) refuses to perform optimally on non-Intel, yet equally compatible hardware. That is surely taking it too far. I am hoping the gcc gurus (who helped amd64 get an Opensource OS first off), give them a helping hand and get better performance than Intel's (pay for use) compiler that doesn't do it's "promised" work on compatible hardware.