I can't speak for everyone else, but I would have much less of a problem with Microsoft having a monopoly if they got it by providing a superior product for less, rather than through sneaky underhanded tactics and FUD. At least then we would have a superior product at a potentially grossly inflated price.

People don't understand why monopolies are and are not bad. There is a mistaken belief floating around out there that monopolies are always more profitable than perfectly competitive firms, and that's just not so. There is a belief that innovation always suffers, and that monopolists always mistreat their customers because they can. Though one or more of these things may often be true of monopolies, it's not always the case. Monopolies are often granted by the government, even yes, the US government, in the form of patents, to name just one. A limited time monopoly is granted to help a firm recover the expense of innovation. If there is a product that has sufficiently close substitutes, the monopolist can't jack prices too high or mistreat or disrespect customers because they can go elsewhere. The original makers of clingy plastic wrapping had to defend themselves against the government accusing them of being a monopoly, and they proved they weren't by pointing out that although they were at the time the only ones who were producing that product, there were other products people used instead, such as tin foil and wax paper.

The real problem, according to economists, is that Monopolists, in an effort to keep prices high, since they have no competition, and therefore face the demand of the entire market for one or more products, they (monopolists) will underproduce so as to ensure there is always an artificial scarcity. The upshot of this is that society loses out on the benefits of having more of whatever product(s) the monopolist alone produces, or services he/she/it/they alone provide.

With software, however, it is different from a physical product in that the cost of producing more individual copies of the software actually go down as the number produced goes up, and no one buys an OS (or whatever) without having a computer (or planning to build or buy one) to use it with. This is very unlike, for instance, a car, where you have substitutes (walking, cycling, the bus) but would rather have a car, and each car produced passed a certain level of production becomes more expensive than the last. With software, once the product reaches the "release" stage, all the big costs have already been incurred, by and large. The box, the disc, the installation instructions and registration card are trivial expenses compared to R&D. Even tech support is at least for the most part a cost that increases proportionately with the number of installed systems, less if you start to get enough people using your software that they can and often will help their family, friends, colleagues and coworkers with your product. Then cost actually goes down for that too as you get more and more copies of your software out there. I'll put it this way: how many people today have to ask for help for how to use "notepad.exe"? But I digress...

What rule of the internet was it that deemed any debate about any subject will eventually devolve into an argument about whether or not viruses and/or other malware exist for Apple computers? I forget...

All kidding aside though, I recall someone advertising a Knol as being "the basic, fundamental unit of knowledge," (what I was always taught was called a "fact"). If a Knol is a unit of knowledge, Google, then what's the name for a unit of failure? The Fayl?

I hereby propose a new unit of failure, and humbly suggest that it be called the Fayl. The extremes of failure (or success) should be fundamental constants corresponding to totality and nothingness, hence total failure is 1.0 Fayls, and complete unqualified success is 0.0 Fayls. Naturally since any nonzero amount of failure would result in a decimal number of fayls with an ugly leading zero, I propose that just as decibels are used (the formal definition of the bel makes it an unwieldy unit for general use,) so we similarly should measure dissuccess (or failure, if you prefer) in decifayls. The abbreviation can be dFy.

To use it in a sentence, "The US Congress Debt Supercommittee achieved 10 decifayls in its efforts to come up with a compromise that would have prevented automatic spending-reduction measures previously signed into law from going into effect."

Unlike decibels, for simplicity, decifayls should be a linear scale, so that something that worked half the time would rate 5 dFy, rather than having to work the math on n*1/(10^0.3) which would correspond to 7 dFy if it were logarithmic for 50% success, and about 4 dFy for 75% success, etc. Being able to multiply and divide by adding and subtracting is all well and good in the realm of communications technologies and engineering, but for the lay-person, I think a linear scale is much easier to understand.

The holy grail then, in our culture, is to achieve 0 dFy.

When a project gets the axe like this, it is rated 10 PdFy, (for ten *presumptive* decifayls, meaning that even if it worked, the fact that the owners killed it and no one will be able to use it in the future implies a condition of complete and total failure. So most Google projects seem to end at a dissuccess level of 10 dFy. I would prefer the term dissuccess to failure in this case: Google seems to kill off everything it produces eventually. That is, if I may paraphrase Tyler Durden, on a long enough time line, the survival rate for every one of Google's projects drops to zero. In a sense, everything Google does seems doomed to eventual failure. For a company as successful and influential as Google to have so many things (everything, seemingly...) called "failures" is paradoxical. Hence, their old projects should I think, instead, be termed "dissuccesses".

Note: dissuccess, Fayl, decifayl(s), and dFy are words or expressions I made up, (Googled them, and no hits!) BUT I release them for noncommercial use by the general public under the Creative Commons 3.0 license, CC: BY-NC-ND.

:^) Enjoy.

~ Doug