The problem is that "better" is being defined by the companies spreading the marketing propaganda about their products, and that has an unfortunate effect on the perception of the users. It's sad that most of the population would simply take it at face value if a company told them something was "better", but if you realise that making users unquestioning and under their control is ultimately a great way to extract more $$$ from them, it all makes sense.

Partially, but I don't think this is nearly as big of a factor as lots of FOSS people on the internet these days seem to think. Remember that RMS wrote a lot of the original GNU tools by himself and wrote the beginnings of GCC. Stallman could have just chosen to reject C and not write GCC altogether the way a lot of modern FOSS advocates seem to act about rejecting closed software. Unix and C could have been cast as proprietary enemies to reject, but he understood at the time that to gain traction, FOSS needed software that was usable for similar purposes as proprietary software. We can cry conspiracy all day but the hard work of building good products is what ultimately wins the day.

(Network effects on modern social/messaging platforms are a much more complicated story however.)

Microsoft, for example, licensed Windows to vendors for decades with the requirement they not have another operating system pre-installed. This killed both "closed and better" and "open and better" systems alike!

It's about who has more capital to aggressively out price competition, even by taking ridiculous losses. Or buy promising startups, or litigate potential competitors into oblivion.

Diapers.com for example. It's not about anything close to sales and marketing.

Microsoft in the 90s might have been the only company positioned appropriately to try but compared with Amazon, Google, and Apple, they did not have as much of an "in" into people's daily lives the way all three of those companies do today.

Unregulated capitalism leads to the company store, which is I think effectively where GP was suggesting things were headed.

Furthermore this model is fundamental to the ARM architecture. The whole point is for licensees to develop SOCs with their own custom components on the same die. That's literally what a SOC is.

As an aside that is monopolistic behaviour which at least California and EU are in top of. Companies have to be careful exploiting their dominance in an area.

maybe an “in” and dominance are different, if they are it doesn’t matter