New economy: More and more monopoly giants are becoming fewer

Anderson (Chris Anderson) from the Internet in the early 80 's, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Tom Maron (Tom Malone) began to think how the Internet will change the structure of various industries. In a series of papers, he predicts that those all-inclusive companies in 20th century will soon "go central and outward" into industrial ecosystems. "Imagine a company as big as at&t (American telephone and Telegraph company), not split into two or three companies, but divided into 200,000 to 300,000 small companies." "For some large organizations, this spontaneous radical ' collectivization ' is a very attractive change," Malone said in an interview with Wired magazine in July 1998. "It's simply that the goal of creating a large, vertically-integrated enterprise is to minimise it – according to economist Coase," transaction costs. The "transaction cost" exists between the team and the upstream and downstream of the supply chain. Now, in addition to the barriers of companies, decentralized information networks can also minimise "transaction costs". The internet will be the ultimate globalization. Where the best conditions, the project will blossom; In order to produce a product, suppliers and workers will be together to form a virtual Fast Company, and then, according to the needs of another product, to make another virtual Fast Company.　　"Small, loosely organized" is Nyaya. But in the real world of huge industries (industry), things seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Large enterprises are becoming more powerful. On Wall Street, Goldman Sachs earns nearly 90 billion dollars a year. In less than 10, Goldman's annual operating income doubled. The pharmaceutical industry has been highly concentrated after several hundreds of mergers and acquisitions. Since 1990, the size of the top 10 wealth companies has quadrupled, including Wal-Mart and GM.　　And At&t is far from divided into 300,000 companies, bigger than ever, and once again a monopoly (at least for iphone users). Last September, everything collapsed. We finally found that the big financial firms were big on debt, and the debt was rare (hopefully never again). In the run-up to rocket-like prices and plummeting consumer demand, big auto companies have disintegrated. The scenery of large pharmaceutical companies is no longer. Wal-Mart continues to close its stores, while GM tries to sell its subsidiaries. So in the cemetery of the monopoly giant, we should ask: is Marlon right?　　Did he say that the era of small business was postponed only because of the final sprint of the corporate giants before they entered the historical rubbish heap? This crisis is not just a cycle, but the end of an era. In the end, not only will we be smarter, we will be different. Over the past 9 months, we have discovered a growing "scale-less economy" (DiseconomieS of scale). The bigger the company, the harder it is to keep the cash flow alone, so it needs to raise more debt. )。 In an increasingly diverse market, the bigger the company, the bigger the stakes, and the less control they have over sales channels and competition. The stakes are higher and the rewards lower. As Wall Street firms learned, the more the bigger companies become institutionalized, the more they limit the company's flexibility. Financial talent has fled from big companies to smaller companies, because only in these companies can there be hopes of accomplishing something that is interesting. As Bauer Graham Paul Graham, a venture capitalist, puts it: "It looks as if the golden rule of big, regulated companies to win the market" has to add an additional condition ' only in a small, changing market '. But it was not until the upheaval swept in that people realized it. "The result is that the next new economy – the new economy that has risen from the ashes of the recent recession – will love to be small." Take Detroit as an example. Charles Mann (Charles C. Mann) wrote in the Beyond Detroit: "The only way for the big three to survive is to innovate like many of the new companies that are committed to automotive technology." Or Google, for example. Steven Levi (Steven Levy), in the Secret of Google Economics (LSA of Googlenomics), explores that the bottom-up model of Google's sales ads is not through exchanges between executives, but through rigorous calculations. Give a big example, like society. A century ago, only countries could organize large-scale collective action.　　Now we have the Internet. In addition to all the usual explanations of the advantages of small companies, leaving aside flexibility and risk tolerance, add new ideas: The rise of cloud computing means that emerging companies no longer need to buy their own IT equipment. Cloud computing will help them avoid raising money and borrowing. Similarly, the supply chain of many industries (from electricity to clothing) has been made Internet, which means that even the smallest companies can accept global orders like industry giants. In the same way, a musician can do most of the work he can do with only a computer and some gumption.　　An aspiring engineer can create and make a gadget (gadget) with just one notebook. Now, "unconscious entrepreneurs" (note: They're starting a business and don't realize it) have created tens of thousands of small businesses and a huge contract and freelancer market. Many of them would do a full-time job if they were free, and many others would not choose to do so.　　This crisis may make our economy smaller and looser, but it will be a collective effort involving millions of workers who are eager to change and continue to change. (The author is the editor of Wired magazine, "Long Tail Theory", translation: Management policy)