| > A lot of the value in big tech comes from scale and integration and is inherently not sensible to have a thousand mom and pop shops do it and keep the same value. Some of the most impactful large-scale tech that exist today isn't centralized or monopolized. The internet, for example, or email. There's been a long history of "email killers", but no company has been able to replace email yet. One can achieve integration with standardization, and scale through federation. In fact, I'd say federation scales better than centralization. In spite of appearances, mom and pop shops scale fantastically. Having thousands of independent actors servicing a market makes an industry much more dynamic and resilient. It's why the biggest restaurants are franchises, for example. I'd add that the period of greatest innovation in the web wasn't 2004 when IE had 95% of the market, or today when Chrome has 65%. Id argue it was that 2008-2018 decade; an era that also saw the most browser variety we've seen recently. > any other company who is willing to value Chrome at any significant price is inevitably going to need a scaled product to tie this to and accomplish what Google did with Chrome Chrome could well be an independent company, like Mozilla is. There's plenty of money to be made in being the middle-man for search engines. |