Re: A pondering...
It is in fact just the Great Orbital Cycle of business management, which swings from an apo-something of supercorporations too big to fail to a peri-something of individual business units. With the split of eBay/Paypal we are well into the downward swing of the cycle.
Corporations become huge for a variety of reasons, some of which are good (different product cycles needing investment in different areas at different times, and genuine synergies) and some of which are bad (CEOs wishing to swing enormous genitals and pay themselves huge amounts; the ability to bribe entire governments.) But modern technology should make it possible for small companies to co-operate to deliver large systems where needed, while not having the vast overheads involved in managing the management of the managements where smaller projects are concerned.
It's a fundamentally chaotic system which doesn't have a way to reach a sensible equilibrium and stay there, as the German economy did for so many years with its large Mittelstand.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
