| Retyred is on to something here. Outside of web startups I think the trend may have actually gone the opposite way over the past 20 years or so. Companies are getting bigger, not smaller. Here are a few: Retail: just went through a mass-consolidation. The more dynamic firms, the "places to be" if you wanted to do something interesting in retail, were the ones doing the consolidating. Think Wal-Mart, Home-Depot, Walgreens, Best-Buy etc... While it may not be interesting to the crowd here, innovation in things like supply-chain has been stunning. Consumer Goods: P&G has been unstoppable, and that's where most people in that business want to go because that's where the interesting things were happening. Consumer Electronics: Dell, Apple, Sony etc... have crushed everyone. Banking: Ditto. Where did all the ambitious young financial engineers want to go? Easy: Goldman-Sachs. Not that innovation here was a good thing... but that's another story. Agriculture: ADM, Monsanto and the agri-business giants have almost completely taken over. Small farms are near-extinct. This list could go on for a while, but I'll stop. I think you see a similar winner-take-all pattern playing out in most industries. It'd be interesting to see the demographics of all this: the percentages of people employed by institutions of different sizes. Perhaps pg is right that it's starting to happen though. Maybe the web world is at the vanguard of what will be a broad counter-trend. I suspect that won't be as strong a force as he thinks though - the advantages of being big are still too great in too many fields. Then again, maybe the mass-consolidation was artificial. Maybe all the M&As owe as much to artificially cheap money as to natural advantages of scale. I guess we'll see. |