Comment by cyberax
11 hours ago
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.
IBM is still around. Look at its stock price. If anything, it's an example of how post-computer companies are much more nimble than their predecessors like the RCA that couldn't pivot from a dying market.
So let's invert your argument and try to find counterexamples.
Google is already close to 30 years old. It's not a new company. Microsoft is more than 50 years old! Do you have examples of large pre-computer-era companies that were at least this old and yet were able to successfully enter and expand in new markets? And not just by buying a stake in some company but incorporating new products into the parent company.
My fear is that AI will make that even more scalable, enabling even larger companies.
You are arguing technicalities, your interlocutor is arguing overarching patterns.