1. No real competition = no innovation

Quash the competition, buy the competitors, sell money-losing divisions to suckers. Somewhere along the line, actually inventing new stuff falls by the wayside. Exactly what has Lotus developed since it was bought by IBM? Lotus was once the world's biggest software company. Or did you forget that?

There are no more breakthrough apps coming our way. It's all been done—and that's the real reason for consolidation. Let's look at the auto industry. What's really new with cars since 1930? A lot of tweaks, that's all. I guess the automatic transmission was a big deal, but that's a tweak, too—it's just a redesigned transmission.

The free market people have a point here, one that I bet would get you shot in North Korea: competition leads to innovation. People feel pushed to create something new and better, and so you get the phone, the car, and the home computer. Dvorak is right: today we see little revolutionary innovation, but a lot of tweaking on existing products. This is what the Chinese have been up to the last century: buy Western products, tweak them, then ship them back to Western customers. That's about to change, but that's another story.

2. Big monopoly companies make stupid decisions.

Unlike some in the blogosphere, I have some sympathy for the Associated Press’ efforts to force aggregators to stop carrying its stories in their entirety. Granted, the AP has acted like buffoons with bloggers, refusing to credit blogger sources in their stories and attempting to impose a ridiculous word-count standard for fair use, so my sympathy for their intellectual rights is somewhat limited. But when they start attacking their affiliates for using their content, I think the entire project has run off the rails[.]

I understand why the AP has a problem with Google, for instance, which takes the material and republishes the articles in their entirety, depriving the AP and its affiliates of ad revenue. However, if they’re going to start attacking affiliates (and anyone else) for using the embed codes that the AP approves on their YouTube channel, then this project can be renamed Operation Beclown Ourselves immediately.

Microsoft began losing direction when Steve Ballmer decided it would become the next Google instead of producing new Windows features. But in the case of this AP mess-up, we can't blame a nutty CEO or the sheer size of the company. They're simply the world's biggest news agency trying to maximize its profit, even if it makes no sense whatsoever how they go about to do that.

Conclusion? How about: corporate monopoly easily leads to insensitive decisions made by slightly insane CEOs?