Oligopoly Watch

[OneBlueSky]

everything you ever wanted to know about oligopolies . . .

http://oligopolywatch.com/

"Oligopolies have been around as long as commerce has. The term denotes a situation where there are few sellers for a product or service. The members of an oligopoly change the nature of a free market. While they can't dictate price and availability like a monopoly can, they often turn into friendly competitors, since it is in all the members' interest to maintain a stable market and profitable prices.

"The new oligopoly is made up of multinational corporations that have chosen specific product or service categories to dominate. In each category, over time, only two to four major players prosper. Starting a new company in that market segment is difficult, and the few that do succeed are often gobbled up or run out of business by the oligopolies.

"Few multinationals aspire to be monopolies. Monopolies attract government regulation and consumer anger (just ask Microsoft). Small oligopolies (such as Coke, Pepsi, and Cadbury-Schweppes) make plenty of money and avoid the constant attention of the regulators."

http://oligopolywatch.com/

[German-Lefty]

1. I wanted to make a modern Monopoly game

I have elsewhere compared the practices of oligopolies in acquiring and de-acquiring other companies to a card game, namely gin rummy, where players pick up and discard constantly to keep improving their hands.

It should have a bunch of companies that you trade around and some way to bribe the political sphere as well.

It'd be really cool if you could have scandel cards and things based on real like crony captialism.

[kengineer]

2. Different view

I have a slightly different view on the concept of monopolies or oligopolies.

Imagine just one producer of windows software for the whole world... Oh, we already have that in real life so this is an easy example for everyone to relate to.

If the company and the people in that company are completely fair with how they produce their product then why have more than one company producing a product?

Competition many say... Why have competition to produce a product? Shouldn't we just be motivated to produce the best product by more fundamental reasons like: supporting our family, creating a better society, advancing technology in a responsible way etc...

So then the justification for preventing a monopoly becomes preventing people from abusing that monopoly in pursuit of their own personal wealth... so these people have a psychological problem. They don't care about creating a better society as much as they care about creating a bigger bank account for themselves. Couldn't we evaluate this psychological problem within people and get them help for it?

Competition and patents waste time and energy that could have been used to produce a better product for planet Earth.

[Code_Name_D]

3. Competition promotes inovation.

Where there is no competition, thair can be no inovation.

Currently, MS dosn't inovate new systems. In fact, Ms frstrates new inovations becase when other compnaies do come up with something novel, MS will eather try to monoplize on it, or crush it.

When the internet got started, one of its most intresting aspects about it was ASCII art. It was simple, universal, and vary promising as a new, all be it some what novel art form.

Ms didn't like it. They saw ASCII art compeating directly with their Rich Text format. So they changed the format of their e-mailing system to outlaw fixed width text, as well as chop off the spaces to the left (removing the tab function as well.) All so that they could intigrate gifs into their e-mails without competition with thoese upity ASCII artists.

[German-Lefty]

4. Funny View

If the company and the people in that company are completely fair with how they produce their product then why have more than one company producing a product?
Anti-trust laws and other things don't attack monopolies, they attack monopolistic abuse. Seems fair to me. The only problem is that such huge companies often manipulate politics (as do their compeditors/enemies) to get away with monopolistic pracitices.

If the company and the people in that company are completely fair with how they produce their product then why have more than one company producing a product?
Why would they be "completely fair"? A modern company theoretically does what's in the best long term intrests of its stockholders. The word "fair" has little meaning to them, but the word "law suit" does.

So then the justification for preventing a monopoly becomes preventing people from abusing that monopoly in pursuit of their own personal wealth... so these people have a psychological problem. They don't care about creating a better society as much as they care about creating a bigger bank account for themselves. Couldn't we evaluate this psychological problem within people and get them help for it?
Back in the good old soviet union, anyone not acting in the social intrest was obviously insane. We would have them sent off to be reeducated, so they could learn to appreciate their place in society.

Funny the communists never managed to change human nature.

Competition and patents waste time and energy that could have been used to produce a better product for planet Earth.
I agree. If you're going to have a monopoly it may as well be run by elected officials. Open source code, is the right solution for software where there is a natural monopoly. Of coarse it is harder to figuar out how to pay for.