Posts tagged with monopoly

Edmund Burke’s quote that is the title of this blog came to mind yesterday as I found myself thinking about and comparing my marketing career of ten years ago relative to today. 

Back then I was part of the team that launched the IBM e-Servers z Series – the 64 bit mainframe from Big Blue. In those years, IBM adhered to the consent decree that had been agreed to with the U.S. government.  To me personally what that decree meant, in marketing terms, was this:  don’t use your size, scale or market position to bully, belittle or unfairly lock out your competition. 

For much of the late 90s I sat close to and worked closely with IBM attorneys, and I think we did a pretty good job of adhering to those rules. Others may disagree, but I know we made it our plan to work within and respect those guidelines.

Ten years later the shoe is on the other foot.

Today I work for a company that has a relatively small share of the market, while one much bigger player maintains a monopoly (yes, I use that word deliberately and carefully). Recently translated documents from the Korea Federal Trade Commission indicate that our competitor does not share the ethical or legal view that guided my work of ten years ago. This blog, however, is not about that – I will leave our legal team to make that case.

Rather, what I want to do here is emphasize two key, related points: first, that competition is fundamentally good for the industry; and second, that competition should not be unfairly – or illegally – squashed simply to protect market share.

There is currently a lot of noise in our industry about how falling microprocessor prices show that competition is working.  Yet, price may not be the only thing to think of.  Here are some more:

-          Without competition the only 64 bit instruction set might be Itanium and not X86-64.

-          Without competition its likely Nehalem would not exist since its architecture is fundamentally a copy of the AMD64 (x86 64-bit) instruction set that is the heart of the AMD Opteron™ processor (as well as our entire line of 64-bit microprocessors).

-          Without competition between NVIDIA and ATI, Intel would probably not be investing in graphics and we would never have heard of Larrabee.

-          Without competition from ARM and the likes, Intel may never have introduced the Atom chip

I could go on but you get the point – competition is productive and beneficial in many ways.

Moreover, our civil antitrust case against our competitor is just one example that has brought to light how, in countries in which competition has been blocked, consumers face less choice and less price flexibility: the essence of monopolistic behavior.

Someone asked me this week if it was worth the money to fight this legal case. I think the Burke quote, which I chose as the title of this blog, is your answer. Companies, no matter how large, need to operate responsibly in markets around the world – something the government of Korea is only the most recent to conclude after reviewing the evidence taken from our competitor and its own customers. 

I believe in competition and I believe in our fight to bring balance back to the market.  What do you think?

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.