It's destructive rather than competitive. If you look beyond your nose, destroying competition does not help the consumer. I'm not going to narrate to you, or summarize for you, either the book or the subsequent web site I posted. If you don't understand the inherent dangers of the kind of monopoly we are discussing, and are content rewriting history to suit your narrative, then I have better things to do. Maybe I'll wash my hair.
Competition can only be destroyed by offering a superior product or service at the lowest possible price. That's what you don't understand. Monopolies only exist, at least in the free market, because they are the best provider in the market, at the cheapest price. As soon as a competitor comes up with something cheaper, or better, which offers more value to consumers, market share weighs to the new entrant. The circumstances you allude too don't exist. They can't exist. Standard oil proves it.
You don't need to go back that far in time. Apple exists today only because, at the time Microsoft was at its peak, the threat and actual existence of anti-trust litigation against it gave Apple the breathing space it needed to keep going and begin the streak it's on today. Most non-extremists understand what anti-trust legislation does, and why it exists.
Though I would have to agree that capitalism is the best and healthiest economic model.. That's about all in your post I can agree with. Self-policing results in chaos, monopolies and crony capitalism. Markets, when left alone do self correct, eventually. We saw what happens when they self-correct: Disaster! We tried laissez faire under Greenspan, our chief regulator that did not believe in regulation. We know what happened. The proper role of government is to protect free enterprise from the capitalists. The U.S. has failed mightily in that role. Excessive government spending, much of it in the form of corporate welfare, is a separate topic.
Of course capitalism isn't perfect, nothing is. That's why in a pure laissez-faire capitalist system, you have a self-regulating process. If someone makes the mistake of investing in a bad industry, they lose their money and go out of business. If a bank takes too many risks, the depositors take their money and the bank goes bankrupt. If a hedge fund is overleveraged, guess what, they go out of business when things go bad. Also, people typically don't take bad risks, because there is no one to save them from going bankrupt when they make bad decisions. There were a litany of reasons why this latest financial market crash came about, but one of the major reasons was overleverage and not taking into account appropriate risk levels. Why do you think this was? In a capitalist system, would this have happened? No. The reason it came about was because they weren't really taking abnormal risks from THEIR perspective. Every time there has been trouble the government came to the rescue. Whether it was long term capital management and the Asian crisis in 1998, the latin American debt crisis, etc. The FED and government came to the rescue. So if you're a participant, you must add this new variable into your risk measuring algorithm. Assume that the risks they took (on average) were obscene in the 2000's. They would have been obscene, if they didn't have the extra variable of the FED/Gov coming to the rescue. With that backstop, it reduces your risk and allows you to take more risky bets. If the financial sector believed that no one would be their to bail them out, would they have taken the same risks? Of course not, you don't get that far by taking bad risks. And the few that did, would have gone out of business. So taking into consideration the gov/fed backstop, the risks they took from their perspective were not out of line. If they made profits, they would get to keep them, if they didn't and were about to go out of business, the government would save them. It's one of the reasons why they took such huge bets.
And had the Apple not been sparred, no other OS would enter the market to compete with Bill Gates? And you know this how, exactly? Can you show us your crystal ball?
The beauty of laissez-faire capitalism is that it requires no thinking and suits the monied interests very well. And it helps the monied interests that the rest are not doing any thinking. In this manner of non-thinking, Invisible Hand economics has its parallel in Intelligent Design: "Fuck science, god did it." Talk to the Invisible Hand.
It wasn't just OS's that Microsoft was stifling. This was only a few years ago, you know. It's not like you have to read a big brick of a book to remember everything that Microsoft was up to.