Soleron said:
Your conclusion from that graph is that MS doesn't have a monopoly? |
Only if Nintendo has a monopoly in handheld gaming would I agree that MS has a monopoly. From that graph one can see that 8% of persons choose to use Mac devices for home computing as of April 2014. Hence, one company doesn't solely (nor nearly) provide all operating systems. And that is only if we look at things in terms of marketshare. This says nothing about the number of firms that provide the good of operating systems.
If we are using the economics definition of monopoly - a market in which only one firm owns a means of production for a good or provides a service - then the picture looks even more different. There are plenty of options, linux distributions, mac os, if we include all computing devices - android, blackberry, ios, etc, etc. Since mobile devices compete with home computers/laptops to an extent, we can't outright ignore them as competition. Especially, since we can always isolate the market of something to find a monopoly as nobody sells the same exact service.
So yeah, my conclusion is that MS does not have a monopoly. I can always use a Linux distribution or I can purchase a MAC. That by definition precludes Microsoft from monopoly status.
