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ashishbharthi

At least something good came out of Apple-Google rivalry.

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Doesn't something good come out of most corporate rivalries?

Yeah consumer usually wins ;-)

Yes, unless one of the rivals has a monopoly.

Apple and a true monopoly such as the US Postal Service could not be more different.

I'm curious: Was this facetious? or were you serious?

If you don't assume that he's talking about Apple (or, for that matter, Google), which is implied in neither his, nor the parent post, then he's entirely correct and the downvotes are totally unwarranted.

What’s the connection between monopolies and corporate rivalries? That comment just doesn’t make any sense.

People are talking about corporate rivalries as a special case of free market competition. Price wars and innovation races benefit the consumer in these cases.

In the case of a monopoly a potential corporate rival gets bought and shut down, or locked out of a market, or has their price undercut until they go out of business and then the price goes back up even further to compensate. Basically the consumer loses.

So corporate rivalry, no matter how fierce, is great for the consumer as long as both are forced to fight fair.

Uhm, yeah, but the consumer doesn’t lose, either? Either way, it’s a idle fact with no relation to the discussion, except if you wanted to suggest that either Google or Apple have a monopoly. Which is obviously bullshit.

Are you arguing that monopolies don't hurt consumers? There's valid arguments that could be advanced in that direction but since we live in a world where the common understanding is that monopolies are bad for consumers, it would be helpful if you were less oblique about your meaning.

Mentioning monopolies in the context of the benefits of competition doesn't seem irrelevant to me, quite the opposite, and perhaps as a result I didn't immediately jump to the conclusion that it was an attack on Apple or Google or anyone else.

Uhm, no. That’s not what I said at all. Monopolies are bad but companies competing against a monopolist won’t make it worse.

I think it's the monopolist "competing" against the other companies that we're worried about. Where by competing I mean doing all those things I listed a few posts back that reduce consumer choice and competition in the marketplace.

Sure, but that’s not surprising. Isn’t it obvious that the concept of “competition” doesn’t make much sense when talking about a monopolist? And it’s also obvious that it would be stupid if the monopolist didn’t try to crush any possible emerging competition. It’s logical, it’s obvious, it’s not worth mentioning.

It was a serious, honest answer to a question that was in hindsight probably not a serious, honest question. (Certainly the pattern of votes indicates that it was not interpreted as such.) ZeroGravitas has done a fine job of explaining the reasoning behind my answer.

A surprisingly (and unfortunately) large number of people seem to think that having a large market share of something is a monopoly.

Other the tons of stories about it here, what bad has come out of it? Competitions like these are always good.

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