Legal Monopoly
Categories: Ethics/Morals, Company Management
See: Monopoly.
Microsoft's Windows Operating System was a legal one. For a while, anyway. AT&T's ownership of local Regional Bell Operating Companies was a legal one. Local power companies are legal and regulated monopolies.
Monopolies carry an odd role in business and social and political spheres, in that they're sometimes a mandated good thing. Like when the U.S. Government decried that every single home in America should be wired for telephone service a century ago. It granted legal monopoly to AT&T in return for the behemoth's agreement to wire literally everyone. That monopoly's profits were regulated to give set returns to shareholders (some huge percentage of Americans at the time owned AT&T.) And it helped build out the infrastructure of the country. A good thing by any measure, unless you're a loner unibomber with a phone fear fetish.
Then there were monopolies that were more or less purchased, acquired, cajoled, or forcibly bolted together. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and others with railroads and banking and oil. They were eventually deemed to be illegal, broken up, and regionalized. And then there are entities like power companies, which almost have to be monopolies, because it makes less than no financial sense to have two or more competing power companies, delivering the same service everyone needs. The initial cost of infrastructure and damage to the environment makes legal monopolies the only way to go.
Monopolies. They're great...if you own one. (Didn't Uncle Bill say that?)
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: Are monopolies evil? Should the...28 Views
Finance allah shmoop our monopolies Evil Should they be regulated
Should they be illegal Alright well big question Here are
monopolies evil And as bill gates used to say well
not a few own one Well okay bill was just
a little bit evil or maybe a lot depending on
whether or not you came from silicon valley So the
common wisdom among most voting public kind of people is
that monopolies are bad evil and awful Why Because they
can charge anything they want for whatever their product is
They have no competition Keep him honest Well microsoft via
their windows operating system was the greatest monopoly in history
Sorry they're rockefeller And for a long time that company
had massive profit margins until the internet more or less
became the operating system along with all the tools needed
for it And it was all more or less free
ish Wealthy interviewee it took to maintain the windows monopoly
along with regulatory friction eventually killed microsoft's monopoly and well
that was that But for a while microsoft had someth
fifty percent net profit margins about five times the margins
of even the best s and p five hundred companies
Worth noting coca cola and pepsi have what is called
a duopoly The two of them together would be essentially
a monopoly of soda but well they more or less
collude on pricing and terms and elbow out any would
be third editor so their margins are high about twenty
five percent or about half of what monopoly profit margins
give so that's the quote bad stuff unquote a monopoly
brands unfair advantage But if you were a shareholder of
microsoft in the eighties and the first half of the
nineties well you'd be just tickled Have you owned one
hundred shares of that awesome monopoly in nineteen eighty four
and held them fifteen years Well your original investment of
one hundred dollars would have turned into thousands like six
seven eight thousand dollars So what's so bad about making
hundreds of times your money Oh and here's another thing
to think about it and t the big t on
the big board Well t was the big monopoly before
microsoft and it owned local and long distance carriage of
phone calls for half a century Give or take it
had obscene profits in large part by virtue of the
us government granting them federal licenses to operate in various
areas in whatever form they needed Teo you know wire
our country But a number of good things came from
this monopoly one thing being that a teen t never
cut its dividend like most of the other companies did
during the great depression A lot of families lived on
that and not cutting that dividend literally saved the lives
of those families like hundreds of thousands of americans who
lived on it for luxuries like eat food and rent
so on Additionally is part of the monopoly handshake Att
and t was required to wire rural america These guys
remote farmers like if even one home existed forty miles
from pretty much nowhere a teen t had to spring
wires on poles all the way down to dead ends
ville and get that home wired and that served the
country well when farms became factories and well a whole
country could talk to each other without monopoly level profits
gained from more dense population areas Well att and t
never would've had the money or desire to spend a
few hundred thousand dollars it cost to connect that loan
Farmhouse in the boonies to the grid Why was that
so important Well eventually that loan farmhouse made it with
another farmhouse and there were two of them and then
five and then twenty and then three hundred and yes
having ubiquitous connectivity of every living human being in the
country said something about the u s of a that
we took care of all of our people whether city
slicker a redneck and allowed everyone to share in the
opportunities provided by a fancy new technological marvel called the
telephone So our monopolies good bad lukewarm Well hard to
say so Uh maybe monopolies are like pineapples sometimes good
like in a fruity tropical drink and sometimes terrible like
on a pizza Yeah we're just saying you have to
peel off the skin maybe it's better if you do
that and don't bother sending in an angry pineapple pizza
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