[BoiledCabbage]

For all the lip service that's paid to "free market capitalism" I chuckle that the first question always is "How quickly can we get to a moat so we don't have to compete with anyone." Whether it's a monolopy, vendor lockin, network effect, high customer leave burden or any of the other number of methods.

And, I'm not knocking that that how business works, I just think we probably acknowledge that many businesses have little interest in actual market competition and letting the best overall product win. Free markets are discussed and desired in theory, but people don't really want free competition in practice.

It's more of an "emilinate burdens on me as a business, but don't make me actually compete" economic system.

[jacques_chester]

I once read that Michael Porter, in Harvard's Business School, looked over the fence into the Economics department, took what they said about monopolies, and repackaged all of the downsides of monopolistic behaviour into "Strategy".

[dboreham]

I heard this 30+ years ago in a business strategy class so it's probably true.