John Carroll

The Forbes list of billionaires was recently released, and as this article shows, Bill Gates took the top spot for the 8th year in a row. More interesting, at least to me, is that there are only 497 billionaires in the world, who account among them for 1.54 trillion USD.

Of those 497, 243 are Americans (or about half of the total). Furthermore, most of the top spots are held by Americans. Given that fact, most of that 1.54 trillion is probably in the hands of those 243 Americans. As a rough estimate, assume that Americans account for 2/3rds of that 1.54 trillion, or 1 trillion dollars. The total size of the US economy is about 10 trillion dollars (which you can find here). That means that 243 people in the United States account for 1/10th of the US gross domestic product.

Interesting footnote: 260 of the billionaires in the list inherited some or all of their money.

Geez, it's stories like this one that make me wish that human beings had never invented religion in the first place. Well, that story, and the fact it also seems to be used as justification by people who run airplanes into tall building.

Why on earth does either side have to BE right? Why is one person bothered by the fact that another doesn't believe the same thing they do? How do they mesh sectarian violence with the presumed notion that the supreme being (or beings) they worship is supposed to be good?

Of course, this whole conflict may be completely unrelated to religion. The mosque torn down in 1992 by Hindu militants was built from the stones of the old Hindu temple to Ram, which the muslims tore down 450 years ago when Babar conquered the northern part of India (that's Babar the Uzbek conqueror, not the happy-go-lucky French elephant, though "Babar conquers Northern India" would be an interesting addition to the series). According to an Indian friend of mine, the former mosque would have the faces of Hindu gods staring down at you from the walls, right below moulding painted with lines from the Koran. That's like building a Catholic church in Bangor Wat.

Anyway, back to my point, this may well be rationalized as revenge for an act that happened 450 years ago. That's just about as stupid as killing someone because they don't believe the same thing as you.

Eric Raymond recently stated that Microsoft's ability to charge for the OS will erode as the price of the PC continues to drop. I agree. So why, then, are we spending millions suing Microsoft? What had the market failed to do which required a government-inspired remedy?

Keep in mind that PC prices have been dropping for years. Also keep in mind that this was largely due to the unified market which existed for Windows-oriented products. Hardware and software vendors could target the unified Windows market, creating competition which would not have existed in a fragmented market (not to mention generating economics of scale). As it turns out, the natural end point of that process may well be a market where it is harder to make money from OS sales.

I predict that Microsoft is banking on becoming a software / web services company, with the OS merely becoming a platform under their control upon which to build those most of those services. At that point, I also predict that Microsoft will open source Windows. They can only do that, however, once they are less dependent on OS revenues, something they are working to accomplish through their .NET initiative (which can allow client software to work across platform). Microsoft's appeal will be the unification they bring to a diverse range of PC and non-PC hardware and software options. .NET is merely the first step in that process, a process which will end with Microsoft less reliant on OS revenue and more able to give it away (or almost give it away. They'll charge so long as consumers are willing to pay extra to buy Microsoft features).

As a side point, Eric Raymond is NOT in favor of antitrust policy, as he reveals here. Of course, he isn't exactly a Microsoft chearleader, either, but no one's perfect.

Allowing local bell phone service providers to provide DSL service without all the silly open access restrictions is a great way to roll out broadband as fast as possible. What the government always forgets in its Quixotic quest to "create" competition is that competitors only enter a market when there are profits involved. Local bells aren't about to go through the trouble of ensuring widespread DSL access if they don't have a guaranteed return on that investment. Forcing them to share access on the lines THEY spent the money upgrading does not guarantee them that return.

What the government is forgetting (and Senate Democrats ignoring as a way to play partisan politics) is that one company is often the dominant provider when they create a new market. Broadband service is a VERY new market. Someone has to create that market before there is enough room for smaller competitors to enter the fray. Unfortunately, the government is convinced they must have a wide variety of competitors RIGHT NOW. If that had always been their approach, US Robotics would have never managed to popularize the Palm. The Palm OS enjoyed over a 90% share of the market for many years. Only after Palm created a demand for handhelds (and make a good profit) did other companies get interested in competing with Palm.

DSL IS NOT the only means by which consumers can get broadband access. This means that if the local bells overcharge for DSL, they provide a market opportunity for cable broadband providers, satellite broadband providers and even wireless options. It's like when OPEC raises the price of oil too high. Suddenly it makes economic sense to hunt for new sources in the North Sea or to pump oil from old Texas oil fields which normally would be too expensive.

Markets respond to profits. Government needs to let companies make them.

Guns don't kill people, people do. That may well be true, but the fact that guns are so easily available (and cheap) in the United States surely makes it much easier for people to use those guns to kill people. Few in the pro-gun lobby would suggest that private citizens should own thermonuclear weapons or cannons, but if you even suggest that maybe, just maybe the widespread availability of cheap guns is not exactly healthy, and you are accused of being against the American constitution. If you accept that private citizens shouldn't be allowed to own nukes, then why is it such a stretch to say that they shouldn't be allowed to own most types of guns? If it is valid to consider the effects of such ownership on the people around you in the first case, why not the second case?

I got to thinking about this after reading about Dell getting in trouble with the gun lobby. Apparently, a certain Jack Weigand got his chaps in a bunch because Dell was reluctant to sell a laptop computer to his company, which is named "Weigand Combat Handguns, Inc." Granted, Dell's cancellation of his order was sort of silly. Do they really think terrorists are going to operate under an obvious name (Dell Representative: "And what was that company name, sir?" Customer: "Muhammad's pipe bomb emporium"). Still, the response on Weigand's part, which basically involved inciting gun owners across the country to boycott Dell, seems wildly out of proportion to what happened.

It just seems selfish on Weigand's part. Does he think that the best thing he can do, in this weakened economy, is to inspire people to stop buying computers from Dell? And why is Mr. Weigand suddenly worried about people being "profiled?" Has he felt a deep seated outrage when he hears that people of middle eastern descent are removed from airplanes because the pilot didn't feel comfortable having them on board? And regarding that "profiling," why does he suddenly choose not to do business with people outside of the United States? Has he suddenly "profiled" everyone outside the United States off his customer list (which includes a LOT of non-terrorists, by the way).

Weigand comes off sounding like a spoiled kid who isn't getting enough attention. Oh no, a bunch of gun-owning white guys are being PROFILED. Call out the national guard. But Abdullah (from India) isn't being allowed to hop on a plane to Denver? Well, we all have to put up with a bit more security since Sept. 11th.

Someone needs to sit Mr. Weigand down and explain to him that the most important thing in the world right now is NOT his ability to own (or build) sniper rifles. Furthermore, the gun lobby needs to consider whether their "right" to buy handguns trumps the public's right not to live in a society awash with handguns. 200 years ago, when people lived mostly on farms, miles away from the forces of law and order and when guns cost somewhere close to a years salary, the "right" to own guns made more sense. Today, when most people live in suburbs and guns cost less than a day's pay at minimum wage, such a right does NOT make sense.

Interesting article on the register regarding NTT DoCoMo's ever expanding rollout of 3G service in Japan. The "NTT" part, by the way, stands for "Nippon Telephone & Telegraph", which just so happens to be Japan's monopoly phone provider. That monopoly, like AT&T of old, was built through government protection and regulation. Instead of applying the chainsaw to NTT, however, Japan chose to remove many of the state-mandated market protections enjoyed by NTT and let the market sort things out (the same applies to the Korean market, by they way, leading to that country having the largest market for broadband internet access in the world). The result was that NTT was free to rely on revenue from it's land line phone business to build a Japanese wireless infrastructure.

NTT DoCoMo is still 67% owned by NTT, yet they are showing the world how to do wireless internet right (through it's i-Mode). I-Mode's popularity creates the incentive to upgrade rapidly to 3G (essentially, broadband wireless internet access), and not surprisingly, NTT DoCoMo is doing just that.

Sometimes it is better to let markets figure things out.

And then there was light....