[csallen]

>> "It probably even hurts more than it helps in the long term."

Compared to what? Big companies and monopolies die eventually, yes, but they pretty much outlast smaller companies and startups by definition.

Being big gives you the power of scale. You can simply afford to spend more resources building moats around your business than your smaller competitors can. If someone built a better Google.com today, I'd still be checking my Gmail and using an Android phone daily, plus Google would be in a much better position to play catchup than AltaVista et al were.

[staunch]

Compared to not having a monopoly. Google has built up a massive empire using their monopoly profits to subsidize every new business they've built. They lose money to give away products and services that users wouldn't pay for. It's a house of cards resting on a single point of failure. It wouldn't survive laying off most of its staff, which it would have to if it lost its search revenue.

Companies that have always had to sing for their supper are much stronger. Apple is the best example. They constantly make new products that result in new sources of money.

[csallen]

Having one primary source of revenue vs having more than one is not the same thing as having a monopoly vs not having one. A monopoly is about the number of serious competitors you have, not the number of revenue steams you support or innovations you create.

To wit: there are companies with only one product without monopolies (e.g. pretty much every startup ever), and companies that constantly invent new products and do have monopolies (e.g. pharmaceutical companies).

[staunch]

Of course it doesn't mean having one source of income. But in practice it looks that way. Certainly that's been the problem at Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. These companies came to rely on market domination instead of technology innovation, because their monopoly positions allowed them to.