> if large companies are routinely this inefficient (which matches my limited experience as well), how do they survive? Because every other large company is as

> if large companies are routinely this inefficient (which matches my limited experience as well), how do they survive? Because every other large company is as equally inefficient. When it's par for the course, it's not seen as an issue (or even seen at all). Efficiency is also usually not the metric that gets optimized towards - other dimensions such as predictability, reliability, longevity, consistency, stability tend to take precedence. Take the loyalty program vendor mentioned in the article - sure it's limiting their flexibility for what they want to do now, but it still exists. So depending on your viewpoint, that was a pretty solid choice in vendor. Also, large companies have the scale to absorb the costs of their inefficiency with fairly minimal impact on their unit economics. And if a startup does pop up and gain traction with a much more efficient operational model, BigCo can write whatever check is necessary to gobble them up before it becomes a risk.