> As a consumer, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a company that can make my life better or deliver better services because of its size.
Please let me know if I'm mis-understanding this sentence, but there are quite a few companies that confer benefits to consumers as a result of their size. Think of Walmart, Amazon, any ride-sharing company, any airline, any carmaker, etc. Those are all examples of business models whose value proposition is predicated on the scale of their operations.
Granted, not every industry or company depends on scale, but plenty of them do. Business is a big tent, and different industries have different requirements for entry. It's exceedingly unlikely that the COVID mRNA vaccine could have been invented by a company with the scale or capitalization of a Basecamp.
Again, let me know if I'm misunderstanding the point you made.
No. All the examples you listed at best make things cheaper, not better, and in some cases they can only do so by sacrificing quality (airlines, walmart) or by destroying profitability in one sector and funding the business somewhere else (carmakers only make money via financing, ride shares only survive due to Softbank, Amazon's "your margin is my opportunity" and AWS, etc)
> It's exceedingly unlikely that the COVID mRNA vaccine could have been invented by a company with the scale or capitalization of a Basecamp.
Certainly not. It would take several of these smaller companies, working in different parts of the research chain and all collaborating organically (without any central planner). The real question is whether it would be faster or slower to develop it in such a scenario, and also if the trade-off is acceptable.
A ride share network being bigger means reducing your time until you get picked up. Imagine 1 car servicing 1 rider vs 10k cars to service 10k riders, they will be much more distributed.
You could also have a complete p2p system and forego a central company. Or your network of 10k drivers could be made of 100 taxi coops, each with an average of 100 members.
Please let me know if I'm mis-understanding this sentence, but there are quite a few companies that confer benefits to consumers as a result of their size. Think of Walmart, Amazon, any ride-sharing company, any airline, any carmaker, etc. Those are all examples of business models whose value proposition is predicated on the scale of their operations.
Granted, not every industry or company depends on scale, but plenty of them do. Business is a big tent, and different industries have different requirements for entry. It's exceedingly unlikely that the COVID mRNA vaccine could have been invented by a company with the scale or capitalization of a Basecamp.
Again, let me know if I'm misunderstanding the point you made.