Ask HN: How are monopolies lost?

Re:Ask HN: How are monopolies lost? by rrf on Thursday September 18, 2008 @03:17AM (#307977)

Stronger substitutes would appear to be a significant factor. For example, the erosion of IE’s dominance following the introduction of Firefox and others (although the barrier of IE being pre-loaded onto the majority of personal computers means this dominance will continue for some time). In this case not necessarily new tech, but better tech.

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Re:Ask HN: How are monopolies lost? by Haskell on Thursday September 18, 2008 @03:37AM (#307982)

I don't think stronger substitutes (Job's better products) are the correct answer - and as you observed, FF has only scratched IE dominance, not eliminated it.

Better product certainlly have some relevancy, because improving IE (IE7/8) will make it good enough that most people will not need to change, but we will never really know how low IE6's marketshare could go if Microsoft had not improved it - maybe it would still be good enough for most users.

At least, Windows was good enough for most users, even with better alternatives along the history - Next, BeOS, OS/2...

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Re:Ask HN: How are monopolies lost? by speby on Thursday September 18, 2008 @12:13PM (#308299)

And also, don't forget that Firefox has also been around for a long time now... and it still has only barely scratched that surface.

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