Hardly. HP and Dell cover most of the same ground, from laptops to mid-size servers. And the consumer space has Apple of course, and the enterpise has...SuperMicro? It has been more or less like this for some time now.

SuperMicro doesn't sell pre-built machines. However, in the case of our small company, they have received the lion's share of the money we spent on high performance hardware in the past couple years, as we no longer buy pre-built machines for our cluster. We buy our desktops and laptops from Dell, though.

Same here. I looked at HP, IBM and Dell but the first two make you go through awful 3rd party vendors that seem stuck in the 90s and while I liked what Dell had to offer it was just too expensive unless you NEED the prosupport in which case it's not a terrible deal.

SuperMicro does sell pre-built machines.

Supermicro yes, and you can actually buy Intel branded servers too. We've had really good experiences with Intel dual socket 1U and 4-in-1 2U systems.

In which business do they have no or limited real competition? In every product line there are 3+ other companies providing similar products.

A monopoly on buggy whips? Oh well.

Yes of course because servers aren't and won't continue to be extremely important for providing everything on the web.

What exactly do you see as the automobile in your analogy?

Google and Facebook aren't buying off-the-shelf servers in bulk, they're rolling their own. Facebook, and others, are open-sourcing their designs.

The "automobile" here is being able to source systems like that without having to pay a premium for Dell or HP.

And if that trend becomes wide spread there will be vendors that will spring up providing those servers. Most businesses can't afford the expense of designing and creating their own server lines. I just don't see the generic server hardware going away soon, more specialized boards and designs may pop up but nothing stops vendors from providing them.

Also there's a lot of money in the support of the servers sold.