On May 11, 2005, at 11:25 PM, Neil Schneider wrote:
Give me a break. There is a long history of companies like Microsoft. Go read some history. We know what happens when large corporations rule in the marketplace without constraint. The citizens suffer and the oligarchs start to control the government, and Democracy suffers.
And, in fact, when a monopoly finally falls, it's much worse than if it gets broken up long before it gets entrenched.
A great example of this is the American steel industry. The few big players functioned as a collusive monopoly. However, this meant that they protected the status quo rather than investing and innovating (take a look at the investment history of Bethlehem Steel in its various works in Homestead, Johnstown, etc). As such, when competition finally arrived, they completely imploded. We are *still* suffering the effects of this *twenty years later* in the pension system.
Had these behemoths been fractured before they got so big, they would have had the diversity to survive and would not be bankrupting the pension safety net system. They also would still be producing material in the US, but that's a discussion for another day.
Maximally efficient is minimally robust. Bigger is more efficient, but is more subject to single points of failure. It's basically dinosaurs versus mammals; the difference is that metaphorical meteors hit business quite often.
The automakers are about to undergo the same problem. GM is on the watch list for a spectacular implosion. GM is going to be *worse*. GM shutting down can shave entire points off of the GNP as the effect ripples throughout the entire economy.
-a
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