big bussinesses and capitalism

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Right now (thankfully) we don't have any real monopolies.
Microsoft has Macintosh for competition (along with a few much much smaller companies I think).
Coke and Pepsi compete with each other and with cheap knockoffs.

What monopolies do is try their best to match marginal revenue to marginal cost (in other words, to maximize profit). The price they sell at is almost always going to be higher than market equilibrium, and the quantity they sell is almost always going to be lower than market equilibrium. With this, monopolies make it worse for consumers and better for themselves.

Also, monopolies, having no competition, don't have the incentive to make good products. If there was a computer monopoly, you could expect new computers coming out to be of low quality (not to mention expensive and in low quantity). Because what competition is supposed to do is raise quality and cut price (and monpolies do the opposite).
Monopolies usually are stopped by a) The government or b) A new business coming into the fray.

Oligopolies can still compete, but sometimes they try to collude (which is illegal, and called a cartel) and do exactly what a monopoly does: raise prices and cut production (OPEC is the best example of this). The thing about these collusions though, is that each participating member has an incentive to cheat on the agreement and raise their production. When they do this, they increase their own profits while decreasing the profits of the industry as a whole (by bringing it back closer to equilibrium price and quantity).

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity -- and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.

(to quote a great man)