3) What are your sources? I had read some stats about small businesses in that era, and it was stunning how much more vibrant it was than today. I wish I cou

3) What are your sources? I had read some stats about small businesses in that era, and it was stunning how much more vibrant it was than today. I wish I could dig them up, but I can't find them at the moment. But if you just wander around an old industrial city, you can see the buildings of the tens of thousands of small manufacturing start ups that dominated the era. The Carnegie example doesn't really help you - it was a startup founded in the 1870's. It was the Google of its era. Does Google's search monopoly prove that 1998-2008 was a terrible time for web startups?