| In what sane healthy market is two choices enough? Imagine saying that about everything else in your life. Don't want to buy a Ford car? You can buy a Toyota. There are no other car brands in the entire world. IHG, Hyatt, Choice Hotels, Best Western, Wyndham, Radisson, they don't exit. Don't want to stay at the Hilton? You're in luck, you can go to the Mariott, that's it. Don't want to buy a t-shirt at Target? Well, Walmart sells t-shirts, and nobody else sells any t-shirts. This would be astoundingly ridiculous anywhere else but technoloy. Even credit card processing networks have four options (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express). As an example of how this works in other industries, US antitrust regulators automatically decline any merger/acquisition US airlines that would put their marketshare above 20%. And that's after deregulation! IMO any market that has less than ~3-5 viable purchase options for customers needs to have extensive government intervention to keep the market fair and innovative. |