Places 2-n would be a great success for many of us

But there are markets where natural monopolies are ... natural. What that means is that the winner will eat all the pie, and it will be difficult to survive, nevertheless prosper, as number 2. The desktop OS market comes to mind. There isn't and there will never be a second place commercial OS. The market is structured like that. Note that Mac OS, even if superficially a desktop OS, is actually in a different market segment, where it is actually well protected and the segment leader. Conflating it with Windows is based on technological similarity, not market similarity.