But we all know that a laissez-faire marketplace rewards greed and coercion. One or a group of these Linux lions will forget to leave enough cash in a smaller guy's jeans. It's not a question of whether government regulators can preserve competition, or some reasonable amount of it before a merger occurs - or before the government allows a merger. Greed grows in proportion as it is fed. Microsoft is not the only Internet monopoly to view market success as a zero-sum game, and it's not only the true monopolies that have this view.
Most optimistic businesses behave the same way.
In a vacuum, this does not portend a lack of ethics or future illegal behavior. Microsoft became a monopolist because it made winning the zero-sum game its primary goal, akin to what AOL and other media giants are doing now. The more interesting focus, which seems lost on too much of the media and the grave-dancing Linux folks, should be the current browser market and the pending media mergers. AOL has two heavily used browsers, the AOL browser and the Netscape browser, and with cable owned by Time-Warner, AOL has the largest single group of Internet access customers. Federal regulators now have before them a pair of colossal communication mergers that will surely alter the way consumers get their TV, cable and Internet.