[CydeWeys]

This clearly doesn't actually work though; how many Fortune 500 companies can you point to that use a mostly outsourced employee base, even for their core functions? The closest you can get is likely an Uber or similar, but all they've outsourced is drivers and janitors; they still employ many thousands of engineers, salespeople, etc.

Also, the management chain still exists, it's just at a different company. But from the worker's perspective that's irrelevant; just as many people still have bosses.

[Nasrudith]

Well that is a bit of a showing up to a luxury/sports car/truck discussion and saying 'my daily driver is a bicycle' philosophical difference/smartassery. It is clearly objectively worse in several ways (cargo capacity, max speed, environmental conditions) but better in ways that the others don't even try for (no emissions, gives exercise to the operator, negligible road wear). They fundamentally aren't even trying for a monolith but to become 'independent' as possible. Less charitably it could be called sophistry to self-justify their flaws and failings.

A hypothetical 'outsource everything' company would be perfectly agile because everything else is fungible replaced with whoever is doing the outsourcing regardless of what is going on everywhere else. The downsides are not only that they are the reverse ofvertically intergrated in that they give up margins to everyone else in the chain and that they have no differentiator other than what they can provide as 'middleware' and outsourcing everything to stay that agile means that it is shrank by design. They would have to provide real value margin as a middleman in order to exist long term vs the clients 'just putting all of the pieces themselves'.

[CydeWeys]

The point is that large corporations have fundamentally moved society forward in many ways that small single-person companies simply cannot do. You don't get smartphones and automobiles and electricity without large corporations.

People can talk all day about how people shouldn't have bosses, but they don't stop and consider what civilization would actually look like if that were true. It would look radically different from today.