Hacker News Reader

How is it “natural” for many industries to coalesce into oligopoly? This requires a legal system with strong property rights for corporations and lax competition law enforcement. These conditions have not always existed. You can argue that the status quo is welfare-optimising, but I don’t see what’s natural about it.

View on HN

Coalescing into 2-3 major competitors is natural in the sense that consumers can't, and don't want to, keep track of 10 or 20 different choices for the same thing. It's just too much. It's the paradox of choice.

There's nothing inherently wrong with "oligopolies" except when they collude together to raise prices, and competition is weak. But that's obviously not the case in office productivity software -- competition and innovation are intense, and there's zero evidence of price-gouging whatsoever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com