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Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand how monopolies acquiring their competitors early on in order to be able to maintain their monopoly price works in practice. Wouldn't the eager gaze of startup founders looking to strike their first big score turn like the Eye of Sauron on any such industry? And all the monopoly profits that the monopolist stands to extract would in the medium run hit an equilibrium of zero when balanced against the extractions of the people it's forced to acquire?

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How would an eager startup person get funded to build something that competes with TurboTax? How will you bring novel value to the industry at this point?

A monopolized industry is also intentionally difficult to enter. It’s not just about buying existing competitors it’s about also making it as hard as possible to enter.

So even when some startup manages to get funding and deploy a viable product, they’re immediately on the radar for acquisition for monopolists if they weren’t before going to production.

TurboTax has also lobbied to affect US law in their favor. They’re a scumbag organization who makes an excellent product.

It's an OK product. The interesting thing about TurboTax lobbying is that they oppose most attempts to simplify the law because the value of their product is for people who have tax situations that are too complex for an individual but not complex enough to make hiring a full-time tax accountant worthwhile.

I just don't understand why a guaranteed payday if you're even modestly successful doesn't draw competition like flies. I would think that once you're known to be willing to pay a bribe to someone who threatens you even a little you would be bankrupted in short time.

Intuit doesn't exactly buyout direct competitors, they buy companies that try to move into niches that Intuit doesn't cover. If you tried to compete directly, they wouldn't spend money and time buying you out, they'd put their resources into other ways of bumping you out of the market. Lawsuits over patents are a good one, and Intuit as around 1600 patents.

I think you could ask a similar question about how profits work in practice. In a hypothetical perfectly efficient market, all profit margins should be zero. But in practice the world is full of transaction costs, imperfect information, and scarcity. Maybe something similar applies to reasoning about the "acquire your competitors" strategy. In a perfectly efficient market it shouldn't work, but in practice the number of startups willing to take this approach is limited (because the number of available engineers investors is limited, and in competition with other sectors), plus you only have bother acquiring the ones that manage to succeed as a company first, which is somewhat difficult. Maybe we should expect the "acquire your competitors" strategy to be partially effective, if you combine it with a relatively good underlying business and relatively high barriers to entry. Not something that necessarily always works, but a piece of the puzzle?

this is why it's important to build an open-source tax calculation engine, as @breck and others have done, so that the creation of tax startups are not disadvantaged (they start from step 19 rather than step 1). this is (fairness in) market competition driving the market to efficiency, the exact opposite of monopoly/oligarchy (e.g., turbotax, taxact & hr block) extracting economic rents while languishing under lobbied regulatory protection.

Barriers to entry.

But it has been acquiring companies, as mentioned in the article. Why didn't those companies face a barrier to entry? Or if they did and it wasn't binding why is it apparently binding to other up and comers?

Did you read the article? None of them ever seriously threatened TurboTax as a whole, they were just trying to carve out tiny niches that weren't already under the Borg. They were assimilated.

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