[teilo]

No one forces you to buy or use software. How is software different than any other product? It's engineered a certain way, and offered to customers, who either buy it or do not.

Companies who develop products without regard for consumer demand or the competition are eventually unemployed. They may have a defacto monopoly for a time, but it inevitably ends.

Competition is not only real, but fierce in software, as anyone in corporate IT management will tell you. Because my damn phone never stops ringing with hungry software salescritters vying for my attention.

[austincheney]

> How is software different than any other product?

Software is unregulated.

> Competition is not only real

You are imagining an unstated opinion. I never claimed competition is absent from software but that software developers make decisions without regard for that competition and impose those decisions upon their products without regard for their users or business revenue.

> Companies who develop products without regard for consumer demand or the competition are eventually unemployed.

That sounds like hyperbole. Advertising companies, as an example, do very well without regard for competition or the end user. Companies will continue so long as they are cash flow positive.