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Against Monopoly
This subject will appear off-topic initially but bear with me. The Economist magazine has a long article, “Japan’s technology champions,” about the mid-sized highly specialized companies which dominate several manufacturing fields link here. The prime example is the world’s sole maker of the huge forged pressure vessels for nuclear power plants. But there are a host of others that number among the top two or three firms in their industry. All share a characteristic attention to rigorous quality standards.
While computers, for example, have become commodities, certain components are highly technical and hard to make, like the substrate in the fabrication of chips. The article notes that for these firms, the “technology is tacit, not formal. It cannot be transmitted by writing a manual or reading a patent application. Rather it accumulates by working with colleagues over many years. This poses a barrier to entry for rivals.”
Other features of these firms result, including their avoiding mergers based on the fact that the strength of the company lies in its current employees, their heavy spending on r and d, on keeping the core technology secret, on owning their supply chain, and even on manufacturing their own specialized tools.
Here again, we see that technical progress is not the result of patents or copyrights, but from the tradition of innovation that put these firms at the …