[AndrewO]

> If Apple has no competitor, they'll continue to innovate...

I immediately thought of MS Word when this sub-topic came up. Since establishing its dominance in, let's say 1997 or so, few features have come along that have truly changed the way that users word process (the last one for me was JIT spell checking). But MS has been adding more and more features in an attempt to continue innovating.

There's a Word monoculture and there's innovation of a sort. I think the interesting point that you make is that it's unfocused innovation that seems to be either incremental or aimed at preempting possible minor complaints, rather than exploring new ways for users to create documents. Not that I'm critiquing MS specifically of this—I think this may be a general symptom of monopoly (and I wonder if the same would hold for Apple).