The real limits are economies of scale. If more and more people leave big companies to do startups, big companies may be forced to raise their salaries. Googl

The real limits are economies of scale. If more and more people leave big companies to do startups, big companies may be forced to raise their salaries. Google might pay a smart hacker far more than the hacker would make on average in a startup, because Google can leverage the hacker's talents across its enormous user base. Economies of scale are based on transaction costs versus measurement costs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm ). Transaction costs have declined dramatically with improvements in IT infrastructure, but measurement costs have changed relatively little. In fact, measurement costs in knowledge industries are very high. Thus I expect startups will continue to become more popular. It is true that specific technologies saturate. Browser based AJAX may run its course in a few years, but there will be new platforms to replace it.