A letter-writer in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote,

As he [Joseph Schumpeter] wrote in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy: “Every successful corner may spell monopoly for the moment.” Yet technological change upends whole industries, creating new, previously unimaginable services and “goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization.” Each dislodges the monopoly position of incumbent firms wedded to the old ways of doing things.

Not entirely.

I submit that the real problem, the one of which the above is merely symptomatic, is the fact that the monopoly’s moat is as much a barrier trapping the monopolists inside, limiting their ability to innovate, as it is a barrier keeping competitors in the monopoly’s established, old ways, venue from getting started.

From this, other startups, in closely associated but not the same venues as the monopoly, not being stultified by the safety that moat seems to provide, easily can out innovate and bypass the both the monopoly’s moat and the monopoly.