I worked for a direct report of Steve Jobs and later a direct report of Bill Gates. They routinely met in secret to divide up the market and agreed kill each others competitors - as well as divide up the market so they could all get rich. (Ever wonder why Apple had schools or why Apple & Windows networking was always broken or why only the UNIX vendors had working networking? Those were all by agreement, so that each of them could get insanely rich.) So monopoly is real, though it is really what is sometimes called "effective monopoly", which is created by product differentiation and much harder to detect. So forgive me if I consider people who believe in "free market" to be fools. They just haven't seen the things I've seen.
Are you working on a tell-all, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man style? Because extraordinary claims require extraordinary dirt that should at least make for a good read
Is alleging collusion actually an extraordinary claim? It is a very inexpensive and hard to punish play that produces a ton of value. We literally already CAUGHT these people doing the same in respect of developer salaries and yet you're still incredulous.
The people who are caught and litigated against with respect to anti-competitive agreements almost exclusively look like fraud 101 rank amateurs. Do you think only stupid people try to take the free money off the table?
You know, extraordinary claims don't require proof or elaboration. This isn't a court of law. I'm sharing my experiences on a public board. The insistence on legal-style proof seems to be a personality-trait of some people. I worked there. I saw things. If some people can accept an unconfirmed datapoint, and add that to their store of knowledge, then they will be able to make better judgments than if they insist on legal-style proof.
No, I'm not trying to be legalistic. I'm saying that being in such an interesting position not once but twice must carry some juicy stories, and the world yearns for more gossip about the tech robber barons who created our modern world. Please, for the sake of posterity, write a future NYT bestseller dishing the digital dirt.
