You, Steve Tomljenovic, wrote:

>The only way big companies survive is that
>they have three distinct advantages which soley comes from thier size.
>They can afford the lawyers to defend thier ambigious patents, the
>control the means of distribution, and they can afford to buy out
>thier smaller competitors and assimilate thier technology (and
>developers).
Can you supply examples of the first two of these practices? Certainly
the (blocked) Microsoft/Intuit deal is the most well-known among many of
the last, and I'm not even sure what's wrong with it in the first place,
outside of antitrust issues of course. The software developer evidently
decides that selling will earn him/her more money than marketing it
directly, otherwise the sale wouldn't take place. Am I missing something?

>In the computer industry at least, throwing more
>money (and hence people) at a problem does not solve it.  The
>beauracracy of a large oraganization stifles creative energies of
>the engineers, which is the main efficiecy for technological production.
Is this self-evidently true? I think of Xerox PARC, for example. I know
it's chic to trash Microsoft, but I know that there are brilliant
developers here who are paid to do nothing but brainstorm. How many small
companies can afford to do that? More pertinently, do you know of any
examples of great ideas being ignored by the big guys, then picked up and
successfully developed by the small ones?
>
>Personally, I see a great future for small business in the technology
>sector, especially now that the Internet is removing the greatest
>hurdle for a small technology business, distribution.
I hope you're right. I always like it when reality confutes ideology, and
the fact that software development is a relatively low-overhead
enterprise does seem to deprive the behemoths of a lot of their built-in
advantage in terms of economies of scale. From where I sit, however,
there seems to be a basic divide between the killer apps, which
increasingly require the resources of a large company to maintain their
dominance, and the smaller, niche applications that can thrive quite
comfortably via Internet distribution channels.


_________
Tresy Kilbourne, Seattle WA
"The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't
betray it I'd be ashamed of myself." --Noam Chomsky, responding to an
accusation of betrayal by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.