alt Hacker NewsIt's not redundancy, it's capitalism.
There is a large number of competing and overlapping suppliers because they're all competing for business and none have gained market dominance.
The US and most of the west is largely in a post-capitalistic market, where competition is no longer necessary because monopoly/duopoly status has been reached and segment leaders can simply use their capital to prevent challengers instead of competing on product/service quality, and margins can be widened and quality can decrease because there's no other option.
To me, it seems the solution is to make it possible again for smaller more agile players to compete against bloated and stagnating established companies. The large legacy companies are preventing innovation to protect their domain instead of innovating to keep up.
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Some Hackers news folks like to downvote legitimately good comments like yours.
I agree, China has more capitalism than Europe (despite calling themselves officially "communist"), and soon it might have more capitalism than US and Canada as well, and this is the main reason why they are succeeding. China currently has much less grift than Europe.
> segment leaders can simply use their capital to prevent challengers instead of competing on product/service quality
This is done through regulations. If you are the market leader, you have the resources to comply with new bureaucracy (that you lobby for through standards organisations) and you don't really want to do much risky new development so ossifying your product is fine. That makes it really hard for new competitors to enter the sector.