Comparing early movie industry to early personal computer ind.

There are a number of interesting similarities between the early movie industry and the personal computer industry. First of all, in both cases there were competing inventors. With movies we had Edison vs. the Lumiere brothers, while in computers, we have Bill Gates and Microsoft vs. Steve Jobs and Mike Wozniak of Apple. Edison and Apple were the first to make their respective machines, but soon the other inventors were making competing technology which was better. For example, Edison's viewer was only good for one person, while the French projector allowed many people to watch. Similarly, Apple's first designs were soon improved on by their competitors. Of course, in both situations, we have the use of patents to protect the rights of the inventor and in both situations there were attempts to control the market. In the case of movies, the control was through the MPPC, while Microsoft tried to control the market by giving away free software as part of its OS. In both cases, governments eventually became concerned about the monopolistics nature of the businesses and both the MPPC and Microsoft eventually were judged to be monopolies and forced to give up much of their power. Thus, we can see that both industries followed much the same path.