[l3robot]

Yes, that was my point: they choose one and it works fine. It is easier in that case to ensure and keep a certain mass of users and so, for a long time. That leads to the possibility of blitzscaling and monopoly I think.

To me, the problem comes when you provide a service. The service market seems much more difficult to diversify than the product market. When the need is well filled by one company, it is difficult to keep competition alive. It is obviously not binary. It depends on the service.

For instance, for the product side; Nike, Adidas, etc. are constantly trying to improve and change their products to keep up with the complex shoe market even if they are pretty colossal companies. Because the user need for a new shoe pair is coming on a really short scale and the competition is fierce.

I'm not seeing the same kind of competition with services. When you use a service that fills the need, you don't change in general. Or at least, people change on a very long scale. Some times, it even takes a cultural shift to change habits.

On the google vs bing example: Well, ok some uses bing, but in majority because microsoft makes it easy to do so on their systems ;-). There exists some very good alternatives, like duckduckgo, but it represents a minority.