I will respond to Matt Maroon's argument directly: revenue per employee is one of the most important metrics in a software company, which is about as pure human

I will respond to Matt Maroon's argument directly: revenue per employee is one of the most important metrics in a software company, which is about as pure human labor as you can get. The eventual business goal of every such effort, including Y Combinator (if you define "revenue" to include the proceeds of an exit, which is accurate when you consider that Y Combinator itself is an ongoing business entity) is to maximize revenue per person. So Google's management, having tons of cash to invest in growth, faces this question "What do our next 5000 employees do?" My argument is that even with a monopoly in two areas, Microsoft is underachieving Google in that metric today. A new competitor to Office, Exchange, Sharepoint etc. will, by definition, not be a monopoly (at least at first, perhaps for a long long time), so their revenue/profit numbers will have to be lower than the monopoly's numbers. Then there are markets like CRM etc. where very successful incumbents make a lot less than what Google makes today. Put all these together, and the conclusion is obvious. (I will ignore the irrelevant tangent on English - I have nothing to prove).