I agree with OP idea.
Of course, we rarely see a 100% monopoly, but it does seem common for one firm to have most of the market.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Barcey
Novell
WordStar
WordPerfect
Visicalc
Lotus 123
Ashton Tate (dBase)
Myspace
etc...
|
The only internet example here is Myspace, and I don't have the knowledge to comment there.
The rest are software, which, come to think of it, is also monopoly-prone.
A Visicalc near-monopoly was replaced by a Lotus 123 near monopoly, and same with WordStar being replaced by Word Perfect. Most of the rest are not examples of the monopoly being lost, but of the market share for the product collapsing. What happenned with productivity software is that people stopped buying best-of-breed stand-alone products and started buying office suites. And even though the companies that make Lotus 123 and Word Perfect have suites, they have not been successful in that market.
Its not so much that Access replaced dBase as that people stopped buying stand-alone database -- except in the large-scale enterprise market where dBase was never a name anyway.
The only way anyone can compete with Microsoft Office is to give their suite away. Now, that's monopoly power.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ekaros
Scaling in small scale is quite easy and barriers of entering to market are low.
|
You may be underestimating economies of scale.
To provide a web experience similar to that of Amazon, you theoretically have to write almost as many lines of code as Amazon has for its web site, despite having a tiny proportion of the market. This isn't quite true, but the number of lines of code you need to write to provide an Amazon-quality experience is enormous. Plus, Amazon has warehouses in the hinterlands of most major US cities, greatly reducing their shipping costs compared with someone starting out from one or two locations.
As for Google, to really compete there, you need not just to walk the whole internet for fewer customers, but, and I think this is bigger, duplicate their massive bidding system infrastructure for selling ads. A startup would have to pay human advertising salespeople.