The article seems to assume that social factors like product prevalence should have no bearing on the actual ultimate economic benefits of the dominant player, and that's silly, in my opinion.<p>We've only seen it more and more often; something may be technically better, but there's more than technical consideration in choosing a product, and if the newer product can't overcome the social inertia associated with the old product, then it doesn't offer a net benefit.<p>People choose PHP because there is an abundance of PHP programmers and businessmen want to stiff people on pay more than they want a good interpreter running their software.<p>People choose Windows because the system is familiar and all of the software they know, often niche, rare, or unmaintained, works correctly on it.<p>And so on.<p>And then there are instances where the consumers don't really have much say, like Blu-ray v. HD-DVD. They were well about even until the one supergiant corporation (Sony) swooped in with extra incentives for the other supergiant corporations (movie sudios) to get them to choose Blu-ray over HD-DVD, even though HD-DVD is ultimately superior.<p>So I sympathize with their intention to preserve faith in free markets, but their postulation that markets <i>always</i> make the right choice technically is silly. There are many other factors, including retraining costs, meddling by big players, etc., that can effect the ultimate dominance of a product.