[betwixthewires]

It is getting crazy out there. But there is a silver lining.

Companies have always grown, become dominant in their markets, then leaned on their sheer size to maintain supremacy, abuse their users and generally rest on their laurels. You look at any big company that is now gone, this is exactly what they did. Blockbuster is my favorite example, but the music industry did this too, and the film industry is currently going through a disruption that is the result of this mindset.

These social sites and PayPal and the like, theyre making themselves fragile against disruption by doing things like this. They're actively creating disruptive opportunities in their own industries by making this ridiculous proposition of disallowing customers the norm. They think their size can stop this disruption, just like every single dead company of the past. They're killing themselves and I for one am very excited about it.

[l-_l-_l-_lo_ol]

Have they ever partnered with the government to such an extent?

[betwixthewires]

Of course they have, do you think the government is just now getting in the business of leaning on private enterprise? You had the Big Ben system for US telephony, you had Operation Mockingbird which supposedly ended, you had many government agencies contracting with studios to produce propaganda (the most well known of these is wartime propaganda to counteract Nazi propaganda), fruit companies, oil companies, the lost goes on.