Part 1:
I have been thinking about the dominance portion of this for a while, and you put it into words. Thanks!<p>And, adding another segment to it, in terms of market-share IBM was/is the #1 in mainframes, msft is the #1 in operating systems and google is the #1 in search (#1 in terms of market share), and none of these companies were beaten, by going head to head.<p>IBM's hardware was beaten by Microsoft's software, which was beaten by the Internet and google's search.<p>Part 2:
<i>The dominant technology company in a generation reaches its pinnacle at about half the size of the dominant company..</i><p>How do you define size? Is it purely a function of number of employees, in which case it would not be fair, since productivity, computing power, technology and frameworks have all grown as well.<p>Part 3:
I like Rich Skrenta's take on this as well, the view is different and well worth a read, "Winner-Take-All: Google and the Third Age of Computing"
<a href="http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_t.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_...</a>