Why are the biggest companies of recent origin?
[–] cyberax 3 days ago
[–] WalterBright 3 days ago
[–] cyberax 3 days ago
If you want to study the history of bureaucracy and business (an exciting topic!), it took about 20 years for companies to adapt their business processes to be typewriter-friendly. The key invention: short memos rather than long-form letters.
So yeah, my answer is that prior to the modern computer era, companies had a natural maximum limit on their complexity*size metric. This naturally limited the scope of world takeovers and made monopolies self-limiting in the long run.
These limits have now increased, and we're seeing companies taking advantage of that.
Some numbers: the largest unregulated (i.e. not AT&T) company in the pre-computer era was GM, peaking around 600k employees in the 80-s. Amazon has 1.5 million employees now. Walmart is about 2.1 million, Alphabet is at ~250k.
And these companies are not showing any signs of slowing their growth down.
[–] WalterBright 2 days ago
[–] cyberax 2 days ago
So let's invert your argument and try to find counterexamples.
Google is already close to 30 years old. It's not a new company. Microsoft is more than 50 years old! Do you have examples of large pre-computer-era companies that were at least this old and yet were able to successfully enter and expand in new markets? And not just by buying a stake in some company but incorporating new products into the parent company.
My fear is that AI will make that even more scalable, enabling even larger companies.
[–] WalterBright 2 days ago
I remember a comment in the tech news from 25 years ago - "nobody is afraid of Microsoft anymore".
[–] cyberax 2 days ago
And you actually are failing to see what I'm trying to say. IBM is a GREAT example of my point. They pivoted from a company that makes keyboards and PCs to a company that makes custom solutions with specialized hardware and software.
This sort of corporate flexibility used to be extremely rare, and that's why you have so many examples of companies that just withered away. And this corporate stagnation was the only real limiting factor of corporate growth.
It's now gone. Companies now have much higher upper limit of complexity. It's still a competition, so it's not like every company is going to become "The Corporation" from dystopias. But there's no inherent limiter that prevents it anymore.
They never had a chance to expand in the post-computer era. GE was really close, but they switched to the "do everything" model a bit too early. Before computers, your only option was to have a financial stake in other companies, and this doesn't provide enough control.
As for IBM, I think it just lacks the ambition to do anything drastic. You don't get _automatic_ world takeover, you need to work for it. But others are giving a good run for it, just look at the recent acquisitions by Oracle.