Disagree. Absent large barriers to entry like economies of scale, network effects, or legal/regulatory hurdles, monopolies are fairly unstable in a capitalist system. The excessive profits that they bring in (monopoly rents) are a ripe target for new firms, who are easily able to enter the market and compete on price. Or technological change renders monopolies irrelevant from the outside.
One of the best strategies for creating long-term competitive advantage is to use the profits from your early lead to do something that is expensive to replicate.
Here's an example close to my heart (and please note that I'm just a cog and this is not a statement on official strategy -- just my personal observation): In Google Chrome, we decided to do native beautiful polished UI on every platform - Windows, OS X, iOS, Android -- even Linux!! This is a very expensive way to build a piece of client-side software, and some might say the result is only a few percent better than what could be achieved using a cross-platform UI toolkit. But it's a very expensive couple percent to duplicate.
Same thing with multiprocess. Only makes the software a little bit better, but again, extremely difficult to replicate.
If you look closely, I believe you will see this strategy being used by the leaders of many industries that would at first glance appear to have low barriers to entry.
It's interesting you mention this. The polished UI and tab isolation are the only reasons I haven't switched back to firefox at this point. Firefox has mostly fixed their bloat and stability issues (not to mention chrome is far more 'bloated' on purely a ram utilization scale), but its just so damned ugly and lacks the security benefits of process isolation.
Btw, the reasons I want to move away from chrome are the "sign in to chrome" movement, I'm assuming this is an end-run around the movement to block internet tracking, and the lack of a strong extension model.
As an excercise - pick a random company out of fortune500, assume you have solid industry expertise (say - you've got a team of a couple of top guys who worked in that industry) in their area and also a couple million dollars, and think how likely you are to create a company that can compete with them. I'd say, that for a big fraction of fortune 500 (which is itself a large fraction of global economy), you need even more than the experise and a couple millions, which makes them fairly safe in their current positions.
I think there are few areas where the barriers you mention do not exist. I also mention the scenario where technological change renders monopolies irrelevant and address it by stating that smart winners spend a lot of time dealing with these threats.
"Absent large barriers to entry like economies of scale, network effects, or legal/regulatory hurdles"
Key supposition there. Because of the economic profits enabled by monopoly, corporations and individuals will disproportionately attempt to lodge themselves into niches where there are economies of scale, network effects, and legal/regulatory hurdles. Or lobby to legislate them, or create products that generate network effects and economies of scale.
Of course, not all markets are susceptible to any of those threats. But as a result they're open to competition, which quickly eliminates economic profit and makes companies occupying those niches much poorer and much less powerful.
