I think you are right that there isn't enough space in people's memory for a huge expansion in the number of popular brands. But they don't have to, because bra

I think you are right that there isn't enough space in people's memory for a huge expansion in the number of popular brands. But they don't have to, because brands on the internet too are becoming localized. A Swedish email company may very well co-exist with Sendgrid, catering to other Swedish companies. The Swedish startup Kundo competes successfully with GetSatisfaction, in Sweden. A company specializing in sending out the same email to many people instead of one-to-one, may co-exist with Sendgrid, just as Mailchimp is. Create a matrix with the dimensions [every thinkable service a company needs] x [the number of possible functional specializations for each service] x [the number of geographical markets] x [the number of possible target groups in each geographical market] x [the number of companies that can co-exist catering to each target group] and you get a search space that can fit as many startups as there are sands in Sahara. Even with a very low fill-factor of that matrix there is room for millions of companies to co-exist over the entire planet. The debate is not to what extent there are huge numbers of market opportunities, because it's a fact that there are. But whether a larger corporation is more fit to compete within that matrix than many smaller ones. That balance is rapidly shifting. The flatness of the Internet does cause a lot of "winner takes all" scenarios, but it also makes it possible for the winner to be a small company. A company like Google still has to do PR to compete with Sendgrid if they create their own email sending service. Yes, they have their brand recognition to leverage, but it's possibile for Sendgrid to say "Google has mediocre customer services and may be a great search company, but we do only what we do best and that is one-to-one email sending with excellent customer service". And people are increasingly discovering that it is on a personal level more gratifying to be the founder of a small company competing for a very specialized market opportunity than to be an employee in a large company competing for a very broad market opportunity.