[RussianCow]

There is always an advantage to being first; if there wasn't, nobody would ever invest in anything new. Even in your example, the first company to bring gigabit internet to an area can secure some contracts that will still be in place when their competitors respond, so they get a head start when that does happen, which can lead to a longer term market share advantage if they can keep the momentum going. Even if that advantage doesn't last forever, it certainly makes them a lot of money in the meantime.

See: Uber vs Lyft, the iPhone (and, historically, many other Apple products), Coca-Cola, Netflix, etc.

[yumario]

I don't think that's the heart of the question. My question is is better for innovation if two companies have equal market share or if one has a smaller market share? I trying to argue that it is better if one company has a smaller market share.

Case 1: Netflix. Netflix caused innovation in the movie rental industry. But when Netflix first began it had much smaller market share compared to blockbuster. Would Netflix innovate again? Sure, but I doubt it would do anything revolutionary again. Most likely it would grow stagnant, once the new market stabilizes between hulu, HBO, disney, amazon etc.

Case 2: Apple. Apple was the underdog in early 2000s and that caused then to innovate, while Microsoft had grown stagnant. Today both Apple and Microsoft sort of have similar market shared and they don't really compete with each anymore. Microsoft shifted to cloud, and dropped windows phone. Apple keeps doing what they are doing with marginal upgrades to iphones, and mac. I don't really expected to come up with another "iphone" level innovation any time soon.

Case 3: Amazon. No big company is really trying to compete with amazon this days. I don't see Google or Facebook coming up with own online stores. It just not worth it to compete. While they are a lot of smaller online stores.

Case 4: Automobile industry. Sure they are new car models each year...but it is nothing revolutionary. Simple marginal upgrades over last year model. It was not until an underdog (tesla) tried to gain market share that we have seen any sort of innovation from them.

Most of the innovation today happens at smaller companies, and they eventually either succeed and become the next Apple and Google, fail and go out of business, or they get bough by the big companies.

[RussianCow]

> My question is is better for innovation if two companies have equal market share or if one has a smaller market share?

If that's your question, then the answer is obvious, isn't it? The higher the potential reward, the more motivation to innovate. If you only control 1% of the market, innovating might easily mean a 1000% growth of your company; but if you already own half, the best you can possibly do is double that. The upside just isn't there to justify big, risky plays.

That said, there is always a desire to grow, even if not by as much, so there is still incentive to not become stagnant and to continue making improvements to your products, even if marginal.

[yumario]

Yeah, when threadripper came out I believe it offered the same performance as intel I9 for about half the price. Why did AMD choose such aggressive pricing? Because they have the desire to grow. If Intel and AMD had the same market it would not make sense to put out a product for half the price as your competitor. So if Intel and AMD had the same share, we would probably still paying 1000+ dollars for intels I9.