No, it's more like a winner take all market, where a few winners will capture most of the value, and those who sit on the sidelines until everything is figured out are left fighting over the scraps.
* PCs (how are Altair and Commodore doing? also Apple ultimately lost the desktop battle until they managed to attack it from the iPod and iPhone angle)
* search engines (Altavista, Excite, etc)
* social networks (Friendster, MySpace, Orkut)
* smartphones (Nokia, all Windows CE devices, Blackberry, etc)
The list is endless. First mover advantage is strong but overrated. Apple has been building a huge business based on watching what others do and building a better product market fit.
I'm not sure, why must it be so? In cell-phones we have Apple and Android-phones. In OSes we have Linux, Windows, and Apple.
In search-engines we used to have just Google. But what would be the reason to assume that AI must similarly coalesce to a single winner-take-all? And now AI agents are much providing an alternative to Google.
And then described a bunch of winners in a winner take all market. Do you see many people trying to revive any of the apple/android alternatives or starting a new one?
Such a market doesn't have to end up in a monopoly that gets broken up. Plenty of rather sticky duopolies or otherwise severely consolidated markets and the like out there.