Natural Monopoly
Categories: Econ
You didn't buy your way into it. You built your way into it.
Think: Microsoft's Windows Operating System. IBM thought that all the power in computing was in the hardware...that software was easy, and a simple add-on. So they hired Gates and Allen to write theirs for the IBM PC, and didn't even want the intellectual property rights beneath it.
Microsoft, on IBM's nickel, built operating systems that were launched with a few hundred thousand lines of code. Then Microsoft added more and more, and started selling its OS to competitors of IBM, Dell ending up being the largest.
Eventually, Windows was over 5 million lines of code. It had become a natural monopoly because it was so big, and so vital to the world's computing needs, that it had to simply exist or the world would fall apart. Risk tolerance for upstarts with few features would be low, so the monopoly power fed upon itself...naturally.