Interesting thread.

It seems like many companies today have much stickier market positions than is anticipated in the basic economics framework I was taught. Competition isn't feasible in these cases, and they're only threatened by a paradigm shift.

I'm thinking of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others.

No one is going to offer a competing mobile OS or desktop OS – not a unique, new one.

And no one seems to be able to dethrone Google, but that might be easier. Note that @DuckDuckGo has the same leftist bias in search results that Google does, and you won't find non-leftist media in their first page results, so they're not even trying to squarely compete with Google on epistemic quality.

Network effects seem to be the main reason why these companies don't have much competition. And this drowns out irrational behavior like DEI, or green energy initiatives, wasting money on solar or fuel cells for their data centers, etc.

They're able to waste money and lose talent, and it doesn't impact their market position. It looks like it will take other factors, or losing a lot of talent, for them to really tumble.