Completely agree. I think the efficiencies and benefits to centralization OP pointed out are real, but that there are practical benefits to decentralization as

Completely agree. I think the efficiencies and benefits to centralization OP pointed out are real, but that there are practical benefits to decentralization as well. Decentralized solutions are not saddled with the same need to appease everyone at once. You can have local solutions extremely well adapted for local situations that know more details about the context than a large company trying to deal with everyone ever could. I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart. I don’t think a lot of centralized solutions are currently centralized because they’re efficient solutions to uniform problems; I don’t think most everyday, practical problems are all that uniform when you take everything into account (ex: supply availability for physical goods, UI expectations/preferences for digital stuff) although again, there can be/often is at least some gains in efficiency. I think it has more to do with the organizational forces you describe.