The need for friction-free interoperability combined with the technical challenges of competing vendors implementing fully interoperable software means most dom

The need for friction-free interoperability combined with the technical challenges of competing vendors implementing fully interoperable software means most domain-specific software markets are an economic natural monopoly where only one product can dominate. There is no obvious good economic or technological solution to this, short of heavily regulating software vendors so they are responsive to customer needs or stripping vendors of their copyrights and open sourcing everything. Neither choice is politically possible.