It really looks like that's a preferable future than the one we currently suffer with: large, immovable conglomerates that lobby for an upper hand in the market

It really looks like that's a preferable future than the one we currently suffer with: large, immovable conglomerates that lobby for an upper hand in the market, have an open disdain for employee culture (i.e., the "take all the fun out of making video games" quote from Activision CEO, who probably wouldn't be anything without absorbing the then small-company Blizzard for World of Warcraft), and will outsource core competencies for the quarterly concall to sound 10% better over same quarter last year. I think the larger advantage is that, because of smaller nimbler companies, there is keener, more increased competition, leading to better products and more reasonable prices. Because of the lowered overhead inherent in smaller companies, more of them can be spread out. If you look at the wasteland that is the midwest right now, they could really use smaller companies dotting the landscape that work on all the sexy (hell, even unsexy or staid or sterile) industries that were heretofore dominated by gigantic conglomerates like Micrsoft, GE, Medtronic, EA and others. The days of "get big fast" is over. It caused web 1.0 to crash and burn; but from that there is a more mature 2.0, which companies like Facebook, 37 Signals, github, twitter, Valve represent and who are starting to inspire others. If small business truly represents the largest employer in the US, we have almost a national moral imperative to eschew building (and supporting!) large corporations and multinationals in favor of small ones, don't we?