GulGnu said:
It is correct that the perfectly competitive marketplace does not exist (after all, it's a theoretical abstraction of an absolute state of affairs.)
Still, Microsoft is an extreme example, due to the nature of the operating systems market. (Huge network effects drive standardization which in turn tends to drive market concentration.)
You need only to move to the duopolistic microprocessor market to find fierce competition even with a small number of market actors. (I.e, Intel and AMD, and to some extent IBM and Sun.)
Regards, GulGnu
-Stabil som fan!
From a third person perspective it seems that there exist fierce competition. Upon closer scrutiny, your all and well competition turns into one party dominance and the rest play catch up. True competition hardly exists if multiple parties always fails to catch up due to pressure (simply don't have the marketing dollars, etc) The party that remained the most competitive to Intel is AMD, and here is their track record:
First superscalar RISC - K5
First to use "Flip-Chip" technology - K6
First on-chip L2 cache - K6-3
First use of copper interconnects - K7
First fully pipelined, superscalar floating point unit - K7
First to extend x86 to 64-bits (AMD64) - K8
Through their history of inventing ahead of Intel, they are still not even close to being the top gun. What's wrong with the competitive market ? Concrete ideologies like competitive markets require all necessary elements to work, not like some Martha Stew*art recipe. If one element fails, the whole thing shifts from one thing to another in a flash. That's what we have today, we have, by name only, competitive markets, all else is gone.
Secondly, corporations nolonger compete to bring you "better" products, they simply compete to sell more and bypass the middleman of improvements. They use tactics like patent portfolios to prevent other companies from releasing products that may eat up their market shares, how often do you read about lawsuits between corporations because of patent infringement per year ? There is simply nothing to hold them accountable. They are profit monsters designed by law to make profit, nothing enforces them to be competitive. Last time i remembered, Microsoft was being sued for anti-trust cases and now they are still drenched in their ****. The point is, the law system is simply not sat up to accommodate changes that are rapid, new issues come out all the time, but bills only gets passed once in a while in the congress or parliament (depending on where you live). The system was designed to stumble and fail to begin with (all systems eventually fail).
