Reply to post:

I'm not sure that without a cash cow monopoly (Office - MS, DB - Oracle, Ink - HP, Advertising - Google) these companies can make money. The need to quickly produce returns to shareholders severely limits big company's abilities to do things well, let alone innovate, or, worse still, turn things around. These companies are forced to make 'making money' the goal, but the paradox is the pursuit of money (as opposed to excellence, customer satisfaction, employee retention, etc) is not profitable. All that is left is stupid things like cutting expenses - e.g. sacking all your skilled staff, to make things look profitable while making one's executive bonus.