Comment by cyberax
16 hours ago
> So what happened to Sears, IBM, RCA, GE, Kodak, etc.?
They never had a chance to expand in the post-computer era. GE was really close, but they switched to the "do everything" model a bit too early. Before computers, your only option was to have a financial stake in other companies, and this doesn't provide enough control.
As for IBM, I think it just lacks the ambition to do anything drastic. You don't get _automatic_ world takeover, you need to work for it. But others are giving a good run for it, just look at the recent acquisitions by Oracle.
People in the 1980s thought it was inevitable that IBM was going to take over the world. They offered the same arguments you have.
They were too early. Collaboration tools and business practices built around them matured only in the 2000-s, with video conferencing becoming widely available only in the 2010-s.
If you want to study the history of bureaucracy and business (an exciting topic!), it took about 20 years for companies to adapt their business processes to be typewriter-friendly. The key invention: short memos rather than long-form letters.
So yeah, my answer is that prior to the modern computer era, companies had a natural maximum limit on their complexity*size metric. This naturally limited the scope of world takeovers and made monopolies self-limiting in the long run.
These limits have now increased, and we're seeing companies taking advantage of that.
Some numbers: the largest unregulated (i.e. not AT&T) company in the pre-computer era was GM, peaking around 600k employees in the 80-s. Amazon has 1.5 million employees now. Walmart is about 2.1 million, Alphabet is at ~250k.
And these companies are not showing any signs of slowing their growth down.
Those are fairly recent companies, and they replaced the earlier giants. Like IBM.
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You are arguing technicalities, your interlocutor is arguing overarching patterns.