[the_gorilla]

> But it's their product they can do what they want.

To the extent that we let them. There's no natural rights going on here, so theoretically (if you believe in democracy) we still get to decide how much power foreign companies have.

[musicale]

The US belongs to various international copyright conventions. The assumption is that countries will respect each others' copyrights.

And the US currently has an extremely long copyright period, life of the author + 70 years. Some (Larry Lessig and others) have argued that this violates the constitution's establishment clause for copyright, but so far the supreme court disagrees, and copyright reform also seems dead in the legislative branch. (And on the executive side, the copyright office is not sympathetic, and international treaties also impede copyright reform.)

But your thought experiment is interesting - suppose the US decides that Nintendo's copyrights no longer hold, and suppose that Japan decides that Microsoft's copyrights no longer hold? If it were only for old games and obsolete software, perhaps little would change. If it were for recent games/software, then I think it might change the incentives to localize games/software for other markets.

[shiroiushi]

A large part of the US economy depends on IP law, including copyright; they're not going to suddenly abandon it.

They could, however, shorten the terms to much more reasonable lengths. It wouldn't hurt the US economy to shorten copyright terms to 50 years, for instance. If they shortened them to 30 years, it would have no real effect on the software industry, though Nintendo would be pissed. I don't think Microsoft would care much about people passing around copies of MS-DOS 3.3.

[musicale]

> If they shortened them to 30 years, it would have no real effect on the software industry, though Nintendo would be pissed. I don't think Microsoft would care much about people passing around copies of MS-DOS 3.3.

Well Windows 95 is coming up soon on its 30th... (and come to think of it MS already open sourced MS-DOS "4.0" for any retro-masochists who might want it.[1])

I'm sure MS Word and Excel must have improved slightly in 30 years, but by how much? They don't seem much more responsive than they were 10 years ago, and most of the shiny new Windows/Office features seem to be things I hate like annoying autocorrect, pointless UI redesigns, new advertisements and telemetry, and worthless and intrusive AI nonsense. Maybe with some incompatible save formats and clunky "cloud" features added in for good measure.

Office's largest enhancement seems to be Office 365, which offers an inferior and sluggish imitation of the desktop apps running in a web browser. This is possibly useful for people stuck with crappy Chromebooks, ARM-based tablets/phones, or Linux.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS

[3np]

Different company but if I ever got serious about doing graphics/photo editing again I might actually prefer a dedicated ~2010-era CS installation on a virtualized legacy box over anything that either Adobe or the rest of the market has to offer today. CS4~6 felt pretty "done". Creative Cloud still sucks.

Surely that's a gaping hole in the market waiting to be filled?

[musicale]

At least we have Affinity, Pixelmator, and a few others.

[shiroiushi]

>Maybe with some incompatible save formats

I thought Office used OO-XML, which they released as an open standard (mostly) back in the 2000s. I use it at work (unfortunately) and that seems to be what it still uses, and LibreOffice seems to work fine with it too. I don't think anything's changed here in a long time, but I could be missing something.

>new advertisements

I see nothing wrong here at all. Advertisements in Windows and Office are good things, for MS shareholders: they increase profits. Sure, they make the user experience worse, but who cares about them? If you don't like it, use LibreOffice.

>Office's largest enhancement seems to be Office 365, which offers an inferior and sluggish imitation of the desktop apps running in a web browser.

I'd say this is the biggest enhancement by far. Yeah, it's slower than running in a native app, but it was obviously a direct challenge to Google Docs, which I think came out earlier and popularized the idea of a browser-based office suite. The main advantage of it is not being tied to a single PC (or worse, a Windows PC), and probably more importantly, being able to easily share documents with others, even editing them simultaneously. That really is a killer feature for many.

[surgical_fire]

> Which basically proves Nintendo has little to no moat apart from laws preventing their executables from being run elsewhere.

That would cause foreign countries to also ignore copyright held by US companies. Copyright laws only work as well as they do because all countries that matter sort of play by the same rules.