Proprietary formats, the natural product of computer software monopolies, are all shit, and they are one reason why computer software is one of the most evil capitalist industries on Earth. Quite literally, competing applications refuse to work with each other. Not only that but they try to attack each other and shut each other down.
What if your Evilco microwave would not work unless you had all other Evilco products in the kitchen. What is it refused to work because it detected a Worldco coffeemaker. What if every time you went to use your Worldco coffeemaker your microwave would make it break and not work right? What if in order to make your microwave work, you had to buy all your other kitchen appliances from Evilco too? What sort of bullshit is that?
What if the biggest car companies took over all the gas stations and made it so that only their cars would run on a certain gas brand. There you are on the highway, running out of gas in your Toyota, and the only gas station up ahead is a Ford station where the gas only works on a Ford.
Computer software is a natural monopoly like power, water, gas, roads and phones. All natural monopolies are either owned by the people or regulated by the people in the interest of the people to keep the monopolies from getting out of hand and abusing the people too much with their market power. It’s worked pretty well except for phones because we stopped regulating phone companies a long time ago.
High speed internet and cable TV are also natural monopolies and as such ought to either be run by the people or at least regulated by the people. Instead they are unregulated monopolies and they are abusing consumers in horrifying ways.
Worse, there is really nothing you can do about it. In any given area, DSL is owned by Evil Phone Company A. Sure their service is overpriced, evil and shit, but you have nowhere to go. You can go to Evil Cable Company A, but they’re just as evil as the phone company. The cable and phone companies each have a monopoly in your area and each other abuses customers as much as they get away with. And they don’t compete on price either. Instead the phone and cable companies collude to fix prices at a very high level.
E-publishing is a catastrophe. Sure Kindle sounds cool, and there are nice things about the device. However, Amazon’s Mobi and AWZ3 formats refuse to read the formats of its competitors, Barnes and Noble’s Kobo format or iBooks’ ePub format. So if you buy a Kindle, you now have to buy all your ebooks from Amazon for all of eternity!
It would be like if your bookshelf only held certain books. You would have to buy all your books from Satan Booksellers because if you bought them from any other booksellers, the books would simply fall off your Satan Booksellers bookshelf. So you’re locked in.
This is shit. It’s like if you buy a Ford car and Chevrolet owned half the roads in town and the Chevy roads slowly destroyed the tires on your Ford car. So if you want to get around town, you need to buy a Chevy just to drive on certain roads. What these assholes are doing, from Bill Gates to ATT to Comcast to Amazon to the rest, is they are forcing you to buy their shit. I thought capitalism was supposed to be about choice? I thought capitalism was supposed to be about competition. Once you get rid of choice and competition in capitalism you have gotten rid of the two best things about capitalism, and you may as well go to socialism where the State Shoe Company is the only outfit making shoes.
I do not necessarily mind regulated capitalism that accentuates the positive things about capitalism (I think capitalism has some great aspects, and Karl Marx agreed with me), while at the same regulating and attacking the negative aspects of capitalism that assault workers, consumers, the environment, society and life itself, but I do not see the point of monopoly capitalism. It seems like it is just a gigantic pile of steaming shit. The only people who get anything out of it are the whores who slut it up with the monopolists. Everybody else gets fucked. Even the monopolists’ own workers get screwed because monopolies tend to treat their workers a lot worse than companies in competitive industries.
What is wrong with Americans? They act like they love monopolies. What are we, a nation of masochists?