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Comment by ssl-3 | Hacker News Reader

Must a monopoly always be bad?

For example: Mitutoyo seems to have a monopoly on producing accurate digital calipers that have battery life measured in years (using one dainty little LR44 alkaline cell). They use approximately fuck-all for power whether switched on or off.

Certainly, the market is open for others to produce an actually-competitive product with similar performance. All it takes is for the competition figure out how to do it and put them into production, since any necessary patents expired long ago.

But they simply have not done so.

So here we are today, wherein: The free market has decided that Mitutoyo has a defacto monopoly on tools of this capability.

Is that... is that implicitly a problem, somehow?

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>For example: Mitutoyo seems to have a monopoly on producing accurate digital calipers that have battery life measured in years (using one dainty little LR44 alkaline cell). They use approximately fuck-all for power whether switched on or off.

metrology is vast. I am a fan of Mitutoyo too, but this is a poor example of a monopoly.

I have literally 3 different brands , including Mitutoyo, on my desk, and the Mitutoyo unit offers the worst value-to-dollar ratio and it's the hardest to read at a glance; it's only there because it's the coolant-proof unit I have on hand at the moment.

i'd gladly give up a bit of battery life for a backlight and some bigger character display; thankfully the market responded by offering this from about numerous other manufacturers..

>So here we are today, wherein: The free market has decided that Mitutoyo has a defacto monopoly on tools of this capability.

well, no.

Mitutoyo is great, but American shops, especially any DoD affiliated ones, push American made Starett like crazy. All of my less-discerning maker friends use Amazon/Harbor Freight/Chicago no-name Alibaba glass scale calipers and they're perfectly happy with them. My German friends often use Vogel/Hoffman/Mahr.

But anyway, whatever. I love my Mitus, and I even have a pair of their very first electronic scale calipers in a drawer somewhere ; the battery life was great even then.

All of my less-discerning maker friends use Amazon/Harbor Freight/whatever calipers and complain about the battery life.

Hence, the source for articles like this: https://hackaday.com/2021/10/30/cheap-caliper-hack-keeps-em-...

Mitutoyo isn't a monopoly, not even close. Just because a company offers a product that is arguably just slightly better in one aspect than others does not make it a monopoly. (I say this with a 10 year old pair of harbor freight calipers on my desk that easily have a 2 year battery life with regular usage. Also, Dial Calipers.)

But to answer your question, must they? No. Do they tend to be bad? Yes. Does their behavior get worse over time? Typically.

Yeah I should think so. edit: I don’t use this category of tools so for the sake of argument I will assume your assertion on Mitutoyo’s monopoly is accurate.

Without serious competitors, Mitutoyo has little reason to push the boundaries of performance or reduce costs further. Monopolies can result in complacency, where companies become gatekeepers rather than innovators.

In this case Mitutoyo may have a fine product but the monopoly introduces a systemic risk of lack of innovation or price gouging.

You’re assuming the market has chosen rationally but economic conditions, patent legacies, and lack of competition might simply be symptoms of market failure rather than optimal outcomes.

Thiel and Masters make the case eloquently in Zero to One.

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