How to lose a monopoly

Benedict Evans argues that dominance in a single product market does not mean control of the broader tech industry, using IBM and Microsoft as examples. Both kept large businesses after losing their central positions: IBM's mainframe installed base grew over tenfold since 2000, and about 1.5bn PCs existed in 2025-era figures versus roughly 100m in 1995. Evans attributes Microsoft's loss of mobile mainly to the iPhone changing platform assumptions rather than to anti-trust cases, which included no provisions about mobile and ended in 2001. He concludes that moats can fail when the underlying user needs shift, and that dominant tech companies should not be treated as immortal.