(forgive me if I'm being dumb. I've never studied economics and have only been in the Bay Area for a couple of years, and I mostly don't talk to .com people because they mostly make me want to punch them and that would make me a bad pacifist. Also this is a huge digression, but I thought you might be slightly interested, Kragen.)
> > re. Google - the vast majority of the individuals that work for them > > I've encountered seem to have extremely good intentions, but > > personally find the dominance of the company as a whole getting a bit > > worrying. But I do use gmail. > > Yeah, I don't know quite what to do about that. I spend a lot of time thinking about the way that modern economic realities drive people who want to do good things into creating corporations, which are then driven to become bigger, more competitive, and ultimately exclusive to ensure their 'survival'. (Irony quoted because I find the legal fiction of the corporation-as-individual-with-rights highly problematic.) People always compare business to the natural world - big fish gobble up little fish, dog eat dog, etc. - and I'm not convinced that they're not being misled by their chosen analogies, particularly in non-resource-constrained environments like software production. This kind of thinking (and implicit assumptions about resource constraints) are the kinds of things people mean when they say things like, "It's the system, man." But what if it was't the system, but just a lack of courage? I've been toying around with the notion that the right thing (in the ethical sense, and possibly also in the economic sense) for corporations above a certain size that want to continue to grow and compete, but do so with as little harm to others as possible, is to commit seppuku. This could take a lot of forms. One could imagine, for example, a big company that just closes up shop, fires their employees, and frees all their software. And I can name a long list of companies I'd like to see do this. But this is an obvious straw man; nobody in their right minds would annihilate their own profitable enterprise. Well, almost nobody. However, what if (for example) Google decided to no longer be a multinational corporation employing thousands and operating in dozens of market sectors? What if they acknowledged that they're not a search company, or an Internet company, or even an advertising company any more, but that they've joined the ranks of Disney and Nike as Brands? And what if Google-the-brand was actually an umbrella organization that focused exclusively on brand strategy (ie, being popular)? The various pieces and parts could become an international network of cooperating smaller, leaner, freestanding companies who once again have something to fight for, operating under the broad direction of the Mothership Brand Management. This looks inefficient - you multiply the constant overhead of human resources departments, dental plans, etc. etc. This draws two natural thoughts from me: 1) With their current clout, Google-the-Multinational could probably make arrangements with various governments to get laws passed that would make creating cooperative enterprises among independent companies for the purposes of, e.g., buying insurance as a class easier. That is, they could use their (present) power to build infrastructure for their (eventual) fragmentation rather than trying to go along with the status quo and ensure centralization and growth. 2) I'm simply not convinced it actually is inefficient. Above a certain size the internal resistance of organizations seems to grow quickly, whatever their management structure. And what you lose in having N human resources persons you probably gain back in having small, efficient organizational units. My inclinations as a computer scientist make me think that a rough estimate for the optimal size of a given spore-company would be something like, "Can I name and visually ID every person that can break my shit? Yes? Then it's not too big yet." Of course I mean "break my shit (from within my own company)" because the various companies would be required to have SLAs with one another, as part of their abstraction away from one another. My last thought related to this is that one natural response is that networks of roughly independent companies, by giving individual agents much more power within their much reduced sphere, give them the ability to do more harm. That is, that the Google Mothership Brand Management would be unable to provide sufficient oversight to many whole different companies of individuals. I have two thoughts about that. First, who cares? If Google Mail Provision Corp. is acting evil, it will hurt the brand, and the Mothership will yank the brand - leaving them as Mail Provision Corp, which is really not as nice sounding, and probably hurting their relationships with the other Google network companies. Second, all of the above is predicated on my deeply held core belief that, on average, people are pretty good, and small groups of individuals do less evil than big groups of individuals. Perhaps because big groups are dumb. Perhaps because it's harder for people to feel naked among their peers. Perhaps because of perverse economic incentives. Whatever. The point is, once they're no longer granted the absolution of having several thousand coworkers participating in the same system, people will really step up and think about their own personal relationship to that system. Of course I could be totally wrong. Joe
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