Lol, popularity vs monopoly is barely more than a matter of perspective. Google argues they don’t have a monopoly on ad services, they’re just the most popular (the government disagrees).

Every company I listed attempts to stop others from entering the market. TSMC holds the lions share of the market and works hard to keep it that way. They are also one of few foundry’s manucturing the highest end chips. Just because multiple companies use them as a foundry doesn’t mean they aren’t a monopoly over certain segments of the market. (Google is used by literally everyone).

If you’re interested in how the chip market is actually dominated by very few players, check out Chip Wars by Chris Miller.

Yup, several companies have near-monopolies on microchips at different levels (Intel for CPU, NVidia for GPUs, TSMC for manufacturing) but not really TI. They used to, but pretty much lost it now.

A lot of science around trees and forest management has gone this way. Forest used to be seen as competitive areas that needed to be thoroughly managed to be healthy. Now we know that’s not true at all, and overall would be better off if we just let them be (in most, though not all cases). Same with the idea that trees communicate with each other and share resources. This was dismissed and ridiculed for a long time, but has now been pretty resoundingly proven true. Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Life of Trees talks a lot about this.

It’s impressive that every part of this is wrong!