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Um, the evidence is pretty strongly against you. Especially at moderate stages of adoption. There's typically a greenfields period in which many competing firms emerge, followed by a rapid consolidation usually driven by economies of scale, which is a fancy way of saying that the market is too small for more than one or a handful (monopoly/oligopoly) number of firms to compete. This is often driven by network effects covering physical infrastructure (delivery or transmission networks), sales networks, interconnects, research, patent portfolio scaling, etc. Examples of technology sectors dominated by single / few firms include telecommunications, power and gas utilities, mainframe hardware/software/services, personal computing operating system + productivity suites, Internet backplane, Internet last mile, cellular service, microprocessors (Intel, AMD, ARM), photocopying (through the 1990s at least), consumer electronics manufacture (Foxconn) and pharmaceuticals, just off the top of my head. You could add related sectors such as Big Box retail (Walmart, Target), retail pharmacy (CVS, Walgreens, Rite-Aid), online retail (Amazon), online auctions (eBay), online classifieds (Craigslist), for largely similar reasons. |