I hate that for all of us.
We defenitely need more than one offering.
Likewise, but this is the economic reality of the world when you want thriving competition. Competition occurs, a victor comes out on top, rules everything until complacency sets in, and then new contenders have a shot at dethroning them if the prior victor's hibernation was too long.
The only problem is, the ruling period seems to drag on for quite a long time as consolidations are constantly becoming bigger where the influence sphere supersedes national boundaries.
You can see this occurring with Intel for example currently, AMD is gaining so much ground, while the past decade Intel has been murdering everything as a sort of soft-monopoly, of which they enjoyed 5 years of uncontested winning, and complacency set in. Now they're scrambling like headless chickens, luckily for them, their market share was extremely high (I think well over 50% in the professional sector of hardware), so companies haven't jumped ship to AMD that quickly, but are currently in that process.
The difference with Amazon VS Qobuz, is Amazon does not sleep, in the same way Apple hasn't slept since their resurgence (though their complacency and lack of innovation is showing more and more these days). Amazon treats all competition as something that needs to not only be superseded, but steamrolled as soon as possibly able. Qobuz needs to offer something Amazon doesn't. Amazon in the past has demonstrated to everyone that they will take a losses for as long as needed, to starve out competitors. The only problem is, these are services that are battling. With hardware in the past you can at least offer your customers something physical that they could enjoy to perpetuity any time they feel like. With online-only service structures, there's no beating Amazon by simply offering a better built and more easy to use app - why? Because they can simply hire out the people who made your app, or simply people better than them, and eventually beat you. Unlike physical products where no matter what Amazon did, they could never offer the level of finishing on a luxury watch, that for example Vacheron Constantine, or Patek could.
Software/tech service companies are the purest battleground and fertile breeding ground for monopolies. The laws rarely have the level of reach that the company or it's tech does (beyond national limits). And consolidation of power is logistically as easy as merging the rights of one companies tech, to the now company buying them.
In tech, if you're not offering niche, you simply will not have any room for much success. Unless you have a great product, which of course will be bought from you, and incorporated into the ruling staple few companies.
