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Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

Sure, everything in life is harder than it seems on first glance. But compare with, say, consumer electronics. Or knife-making. And so on. They have all these same problems and more, and no one company dominates in this same fashion.

So, why is that?

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I think there are many sectors where just one or two companies really dominate the industry.

PayPal seems like one, especially for international payments. iPhones and Androids. Windows. Cargill for food.

Granted, I am having trouble coming up with companies where "just one" company dominates the market, but overall this seems more common than one would like to think.

You are correct in that "it is difficult" would not be sufficient to explain why there are so few competitors. But I think I feel similarly about these other industries as well.

This comparison with Luxotica breaks down for two reasons. First is when you consider that Paypal has network effects and iOS and Android are platforms. Pushing glasses frames has neither of these impediments for upstarts. The second is the ridiculous markup. If Paypal increased their transaction fee from 3% to 30%, a competitor would kill them. Cargill didn't bump food prices 10-fold even though bio-engineering is at least an order of magnitude more complex and costly than molded plastic in a pretty shape.

Perhaps reality and the market are not as its been described to you?

http://www.amazon.com/Cornered-Monopoly-Capitalism-Economics...

Sure. I am not a free market zealot. But compare and contrast with, for example, shoes. Why the difference? Is it sustainable?

This seems like a particularly interesting case study, perhaps not fitting well into any particular ideological framework.

Eyeglasses are an example directly from this book, which at least one of the news organization has likely read.

This problem is across every industry, but because of the way branding, shell corporations etc work people do not notice.

Ask yourself whether shoes is truly different? How many places around the globe produce a _lot_ of shoes?

How about hard drives? Refrigerators?

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