Comment by kasey_junk

You made a more specific claim than it being captured by a monopoly or duopoly. You claimed that the leaders definitively will cause dramatic price increases implying that the current pricing are just for capturing market share (ala uber/lyft).

Yet for every example you just delivered that _did not happen_. OSes have wide choice including a free option that is widely used, phones got cheaper, Amazon does not have a monopoly for online shopping, Netflix and Spotify compete in extremely cut throat markets with very low margin. Then there are the other players that tried that exact model and are failing (eg doordash and Grubhub).

The “bait and switch” approach requires there to be no viable alternative. Where we’ve seen that is in products with very strong network effects. To date the ai market doesn’t display that, if you don’t like cursor go to vs code, if Claude is better than Gemini it is trivial to switch, etc.