[ataggart]

How curious that being the best in a competition is seen as anti-competitive, and that keeping one's innovations secret is seen as a barrier to entry.

"[T]he English language... becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

[krapp]

I think that some people misinterpret the premise of a free (or freeish) market to mean that, no matter how successful a player is, barriers to entry should still remain constant and neutral. This appeals to the ideal image of a lone entrepreneur disrupting industries from their garage with pocket money, sweat and genius, but obviously doesn't consider that the last thing any successful company wants is to provide a level playing field for their competitors.

Of course it's "anti-competitive", in a sense, but not unfair. No one is stopping other companies from competing against Google. It just happens that the market decided Google won... years ago. And now they own Youtube and Gmail and the OS that runs on a lot of mobile phones and they have so much money to burn they can try to make cars that drive themselves. No one is stopping people from using other search engines as well, it just happens that people decided years ago that Google worked better than anything else. This is the way it's supposed to work. The superior product wins and dominates, and redefines the market so that everyone has to play on their terms, while everything else dies, or limps along in the shadows hoping not to get eaten. But maybe if you're lucky, you find a niche, or the dinosaurs get wiped out.