Business, naturally, wants to get back to business and end the transition quickly. To bring off rapid global deployments, for example, you must have standards, but standards are not to be had when a category is brand new. So the market standardizes on the market leader's architecture, making it the de facto standard. If that architecture is proprietary, as it was in the case of Intel, Microsoft, Cisco and Novell, then the market confers a tremendous competitive advantage on that vendor. It becomes virtually impossible for any rival architecture to succeed.
Business has no time to wait for the development of a competing standard.
This is the domain of what economists now call the law of increasing returns, which states that as a company gains market share, its power and profits increase, rather than decrease, with each additional percentage point of share. This is a fairly rare occurrence. The more familiar law of diminishing returns usually occurs, and it has a natural curbing effect on monopolies. Compare Microsoft's position in the NT server space, for example, with Compaq's in the PC space. It is not a gorilla.