Originally <a href='/showthread.php?p=16787150'>posted</a> on 11/15/2012:

Oh wow, best bump I've read in years, Dudley. I remember reading this when it was a new thread and not quite grasping all that was being said, and it's quite satisfying to read it again today able to fully grasp what everyone's saying and the accompanying subtexts.

As for my take on the question at hand, I think we haven't seen another Pinnacle emerge because we have yet to see Pinnacle make a big mistake in their operation. When a company finds a position of overt dominance in an emerging market, as Pinnacle did in a time when 90% of sports wagers were being placed over the phone, the people that make the switch to the new method become tacit investors in the new company. They seldom have any legal equity in the company, but they see themselves as "belonging" to the new wave of customers who blazed the trail into more fertile fields.

We've seen this happen several times in recent decades, with IBM in the 80's, Microsoft in the 90's, and Google in the 2000's. All of these companies held/hold natural monopolies in their market by virtue of being the first on the scene with an innovation, allowing them to create large economies of scale on a level which precludes genuine competition until their customers begin searching for an alternative on their own. Of the three, only IBM fails to remain the behemoth in the market which they once dominated, and that's because they failed to stay relevant when the PC market decentralized and suddenly every component of their integrated solutions was being innovated upon by several new competitors, many of which being able to beat IBM to the punch by virtue of having a narrower focus. Companies popped up to build their own computer brands with parts from 20-30 different small companies while IBM was still laboring to make everything in-house. IBM dropped the ball and that's how the wave of PC manufacturers we're familiar with now finally got their foot in the door.

In my opinion, we'll need to see a similar gaffe on the part of Pinnacle before they have any viable competition. It's not that what Pinnacle does can't be replicated, it's that they already do it so smoothly on such low margins that there's very few gripes their customers have which might allow them to be lured away. If they ever make a move which gives a significant portion of their customers a reason to look elsewhere for an alternative, that's when I think we'll see an established bookmaker create a brand to compete in that market sector.