4 ms·
Consolidation has benefit. Mao, durring the cultural revolution thought the same thing. That villages could be doing all their own metal work. No one needs a m
by zer00eyz 3y ago
Consolidation has benefit.
Mao, durring the cultural revolution thought the same thing. That villages could be doing all their own metal work. No one needs a major steel or iron works so break those up and let things be produced locally.
It backfired spectacularly.
There are things that can only be done at scale (steel). There are things that you can let have more linear growth as you scale (accounting), IT.
You get very interesting things when companies get very large. Bell labs, gave us unix (that ATT gave away cause it was a monopoly). Xerox gave us the modern GUI. ML foundations emerged out of google. The funding for 23 and me came from google founders and helped push squencing (capital into that market).
Innovation tends to come from taking smart people throwing piles of money at them, and letting them do their thing.
This was the realm of the aristocracy, then the university, then the government and now it's in the hands of private business. Everyone may hate on musk but rockets that land is progress that got made because he got stupidly rich and beat the incumbants.
If you want something different, you can have that. You can start your own company, run it in the style of Mondragon (cool corp go check them out) and claw your way to the top.
- kelnos 3y agoWe can also accept that slower, more gradual levels of invention and innovation is the price of not setting ourselves up for avoiding sliding into a corporatist techno-dystopia.
- chucke1992 3y agoBy "slower, more gradual levels" do you mean falling behind and taken over by some other foreign company? History showed time and time again (in every sphere) that more aggressive, more hungry competitor (company, person) will win in the end. Europe is the notorious "old man" of the world.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago> Europe is the notorious "old man" of the world. That's because they bombed themselves to smithereens twice within 30 years about a century ago.