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Glitter Blood Magick

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love the machine, hate the factory

Is competition dead?

started by MGNTZmgntz ·2 replies
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When it comes to cultural changes I’ve had this big question on my mind about the current state of competition in our market society.


So, is competition in our current market dead? And if so what happened?


To start the reason why I’m asking has to do with my general disenfranchisement of our current market. Now for some history, it’s interesting to see how firms and companies did actually try to compete with each other. Like how you see the apple vs. Microsoft ads but what exactly happened to that? I was always under the premise that a capitalist free market system, would harness the Darwinistic character of fitness and being the best. But all I see nowadays are these massive companies doing some of the most embarrassing decisions in my life but why? Why don’t they WANT to make something better? There’s almost this sort of new attitude of no competition but we’re just friends. So instead of direct competition, it’s more like a weird cold war where companies want to make something better but they also don’t care to do so because why should they?


The problem I largely have is that I don’t think companies have to suck or be bad but the lack of competition can really let the companies we hate abuse their power and not focus on being better than another company which is a shame.


I personally have my own theories and this issue is surprisingly complex. In short, I think this has more to do with how we’re economically living in a monopolistic competitive era. High barriers to entry, and nonprice competition.


I’ve always wanted to ask this since joining too since I find that competition was noticeably stronger in past decades. But I could be wrong..

edited

Competition was always doomed to end in the way it used to exist, for the simple reason that shareholder profit is considered (by law, even!) the sole purpose of a publicly traded company. For X company, having a monopoly on something is always going to be better than competing against Y company, and vice versa. So what happens is a kind of unspoken agreement between these corporations: X company will not attempt to compete with Y company in area A, and Y company won’t try to compete with X company in area B. The was done most fervently with telecommunications companies for a long time, but an easier to understand example would be Microsoft allowing Xbox exclusives like Cuphead to be sold on the Nintendo eshop, because the way Microsoft sees it, they don’t compete with Nintendo. This sort of thing is being done to a more and more extreme extent across just about all financial field - large companies simply agree not to compete, allowing for soft monopolies to form within specific sub-sectors of a market. Any smaller companies or start up that attempt to disturb this balance are ruthlessly crushed, which is much easier now that smaller companies can’t leverage competition between large companies to create a niche for themselves.


TL;DR Finance is gradually reaching a point where major corporations simply won’t tolerate competition anymore. It’s much easier just to create multiple soft monopolies within specific market niches and agree not to interfere with the soft monopolies of your supposed competitors as long as they don’t interfere with yours.