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Comment by gspr | Hacker News Reader

Right. But viewed differently, that made everyone have to compete at actually making good PCs, instead of relying on customers unable to escape to another vendor due to lock-in.

We want this. Software and other modern tech desperately need this! How many companies are stuck with an absolutely terrible suite of MS products because you can't easily rip out and replace just the IM or videoconferencing part, for example?

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Its good for the buyers, and good for broader society and the economy.

Its bad for vendors.

Why would vendors do something that is bad for them? HN is full for people talking about how to create a "moat" for their products. Why do you expect hardware vendors not to want to do the same?

> Why do you expect hardware vendors not to want to do the same?

of course they want the moat - the point is that society as a whole should force them not to have a moat. Ala, they should not be allowed monopolies.

Unfortunately, this sort of legislation has been lacking recently, and in fact, has been failing even enforcing existing ones from yester-century.

This is true about most businesses, hence the dissonance. Pretty much every time a business creates "a moat", it's bad for consumers in some way.

Except if the moat is something like "have managed to attract and retain stellar workers who make fantastic products with excellent durability and support at a reasonable price, resulting in such a happy customer base that any upstart will struggle to gain a foothold". The horror!

If only it was possible to have that moat. Alas, optimizing quality of products and employment away is a competitive advantage.

Only because we let it be. I truly believe that we can wield regulations to make it not so.

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