[snarfybarfy]

The product you seem to be talking about is not part of 'the market'. Otherwise competition would drive the price down to intrinsic cost + small profit (remember the 'invisible hand'?)

10 years and 1000's of lawyers to find out whether Microsoft is a monopoly? Give me a break! Just look at their income statement! Profit margins of 30% and more for 30 or more years? Do you seriously believe nobody would or could do the same for 20% profits?

A real market economy would tax away most of the excess profits after a certain number of years (depending on industry?). But then you would not have Apple and Microsoft and all your other beloved monopolists.

Ps: I'm a bit undecided but maybe it's OK for luxury products to not be part of the market. If you want to pay $200 more for an additional 1 GB on your iPhone when the price for 1 GB is $20, then it's no skin of my nose. But please make sure Apple pays their taxes.

[alexasmyths]

"tax away most of the excess profits"

How do you define 'excess profits'.

And BTW - yes - I really do believe 'nobody can compete with Microsoft'.

Do you realize how sophisticated those products are?

And for every MS product, there are tons of competitors.

MS doesn't just make a 'widget' - they depend upon the talent (and ability to evolve that), deep value chain integration, R&D - it's a constantly moving team.

[snarfybarfy]

Taxing excess profits should be somewhat analogous to patents. (Well, except for the huge mess that patents these days are, but I am more talking about the conceptual reasoning behind them).

The creator gets a time limited monopoly to pay for his efforts. Nobody ever thought having an unlimited monopoly was good for society (well except for the guys actually having the monopoly, cuz you know it trickles down somehow).

Regarding the quality of MS products, why it's obvious that they used some of their monopoly rents to hire smart people to work on it.

But the point still stands that they were and still are a monopoly. Otherwise someone equally smart would have broken into their market and pushed profit margins down.