I experienced this disconnect when I was out here in Silicon Valley in private practice on some software deals, and saw the utterly perplexed looks on the faces of business people from CEO's to marketing and product managers to programmers when they were confronted with the antitrust world, with the attempts of the enforcement agencies to analyze the likely competitive effects of their merger or other business arrangement. They thought the government was nuts, that the staff lawyers and economists had no idea how their markets worked. The government's theories on pricing, innovation and entry all seemed alien to them. The principles I learned and that I knew the government was applying were meant to promote innovation, competition the free market. The technology changes too fast.
Human capital is the key asset.
There are a lot of smart, mobile people with nothing better to do than write programs. You don't even need a lot of them. Most of the time, small groups outproduce large development teams anyway, since big groups often don't work as well together as small ones do. But despite this conventional wisdom, cases started popping up. And of course, the Microsoft con-sent decree.