I believe Gruber's view is that the market forces in question are between iPhone and competing smartphones.

▲ snackbroken a day ago | parent | next [-]

Market forces are not effective at creating good outcomes when there is an oligopoly.

If there are two producers each with ~50% market share, it's not profitable for one of them to improve their product such that they capture an additional 5% of the market but reduces the profit margin of their product by 10%. If there are 50 producers each with ~2% market share, one of them would happily capture 5% of the market (more than doubling the size of their business!) by sacrificing 10% of their profit margin.

In the Google-Apple duopoly it's much more profitable to engage in tacit collusion than it is to defect.

▲ jgruber a day ago | parent | prev [-]

No. It’s broader than that. The market forces are the entire realm of what’s possible, now and in the future. When Windows seemed entrenched forever, the platforms that eventually surpassed weren’t the competing desktop OSes (Mac and Linux). It was the web first, in the late 1990s-2000s, then mobile (iPhone and Android) in the 2010s.

Necessity really is the mother of invention, and the more we need something new, the sooner someone will invent it. But it will look no more like an iPhone than the iPhone looked like a PC.

▲ lapcat a day ago | parent | next [-]

> The market forces are the entire realm of what’s possible, now and in the future.

I actually suspected as much and left "competing smartphones" somewhat vague.

> When Windows seemed entrenched forever

It's still entrenched! Microsoft got a slap on the wrist by the government right before September 11, and antitrust enforcement has been on a holiday ever since.

> the platforms that eventually surpassed weren’t the competing desktop OSes (Mac and Linux)

In terms of revenue, desktop computers were surpassed by smartphones, but they were not replaced by smartphones. I don't consider them to be directly competing products, and most of us who can afford it own both. A smartphone fits in your pocket, whereas a keyboard and pointing device and large screen will never fit in your pocket.

▲ applfanboysbgon a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is a ridiculous take. The iPhone was enabled by unrelated advances in computer hardware miniaturization, it had absolutely nothing to do with Windows' dominance creating "necessity". It was not competing with, and never did, replace Windows. Regulation is needed to ensure that people can compete within a market, not just create an entirely new market as enabled by technological advances which would have happened anyways.

▲ jgruber a day ago | parent [-]

It's a little simplistic, sure, but I mean how much nuance do you expect me to fit into a HN comment? What I left out is Windows Mobile, which was Microsoft's attempt to extend the Windows hegemony to mobile devices. Here are Windows Mobile's US market share numbers, per Wikipedia:

What do you think happened in 2007?

	▲	applfanboysbgon a day ago \| parent [-]
		Somebody came up with better phone technology. Which would have happened anyways. Your argument was that it was necessary for Microsoft and now Apple to have a monopoly in order to create "necessity" for innovation, but Microsoft's monopoly was not driving Moore's law. The iPhone would have happened with or without Windows Mobile.

▲ madeofpalk 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The question is whether it's possible for a genuinely new competitor to arrive. Back in the earlier days, before Apple and Google were so entrenched, competitors weren't able to do it.

The modern smartphone became popular and dislodged the previous status quo because they were genuinely new form factors and interfaces. They didn't just steal the market away from Blackberry and Windows Phone, they invented a new one and starved out the previous.

And if a new platform were to arrive, they're so broad that it's entirely possible they wouldn't even compete on the App Store. When companies squeeze out and screw over others, and the market isn't able to signal that its not good, it's time for regulators to step in.