Competition

Found this posting Victor Niederhoffer’s blog on competition. I agree competition is good for society / consumer , but bad for an investor. I would prefer a company which is close to a unregulated monopoly ( a toll bridge as buffett says )

Competition, by Victor Niederhoffer:
Competition in its many aspects — markets, trees, companies, old heartedness, protection of consumers, romance — is the main force responsible for our high standard of living. It brings out the best in us and provides the consumer with the price and quality he wants. James Lorie, along with Franklin Fisher, was one of the chief consultants for IBM in the antitrust action against it in the 1970s. I came across this quote by Fisher vis a vis the similarities to the Microsoft case:
Every practice that the government complained of had to due basically with the offering of better products or lower prices. The government did not understand that that is the way competition works.
He then goes on to show how IBM had developed a better and smaller disk and the government complained it was a predatory device.
If only the public were educated to realize that there is always someone waiting around to provide a product at a more attractive price or quality or time or convenience, then so much wasted envy and loss would be averted.