A friend of mine was working on a contract project for a major Canadian telco. The project was almost entirely complete, just a few things left to get the client to sign off on the project and go live. None of the people involved on the telco side had a huge interest in this project; it was just something else that was going on.

Then, suddenly, it seems as though they realized that this small project was the CEO's pet project. Overnight, everyone involved suddenly had opinions on what could be changed to be better, to be friendlier. Change the colors, the fonts, the layout, move things around, pick a different image, back and forth. As soon as there was an opportunity to attach their name in a place the CEO might see, everyone was clamoring to make some kind of a difference as soon as possible.

In the end, it delayed the project by weeks and wasted huge amount of my friend's agency's time trying to push back on all of these changes on things that had already been approved, or which didn't need to be changed. Incredibly gross.

Amazon and apple’s numbers are inflated by retail and warehouse staff significantly, who are effectively political non actors as far as this dynamic goes

Amazon yes, Apple no, there is an internal difference between retail (not on slack, except executives, high level logistics, etc) and corporate. When I worked there there were 180000 people in the general channel (that includes some contractors, but the number is not that off), and that is only corporate.

Google released its search engine when it was just 2 guys.

If those two guys kept working on it for the past 25 years, but hired nobody new, I wonder what their product would look like? I suspect it would still be pretty decent.

It wouldn't ever have become what we know of as Google today.

When I worked at Google I was lucky and had coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat many mornings when my desk was near them and we had shared interests. I got the chance to quiz Jeff a bunch about the early days. When they joined, L&S had already handed indexing off to a couple programmers who had written a system that had to be run all the way through (all steps of indexing) to build a whole new index. Any failure in any step- even just one simple worker- meant you had to run all over again. That led to the development of MapReduce, GFS, and BigTable, which allowed google to scale search while also improving search prerformance (latency of a query, latency of crawling hot documents and having them appear in the index). Jeff definitely didn't have a high opinion of Larry and Sergey's programming skills.

But then, the search engine was really just phase 0 in Larry's attempt to revoluntize the world of information, sort of the things you have to do at the start of a realtime strategy game to get your tech tree up to AI.

> I suspect it would still be pretty decent.

A fun thought experiment, but I suspect they'd be bankrupt from the meritless lawsuits that come from being big, or in prison for not being able to follow laws they had to be big to lobby against.

And even if not, the combined efforts of the scammers would probably evolve faster than two people could react.

Since we are in fun thought experiment mode, here’s another one I just had: what if we somehow could prevent companies from getting too big? Would we manage to keep a line where they all stay more or less in “pretty decent” territory?

By what metric, and how would it be different than antitrust enforcement?

E.g. a product that is clearly better can legally capture 100% market share. Only leveraging that market power is illegal.

I genuinely think a rule along the lines of "anything with 30%+ market share is scrutinized as having monopolistic network effect advantage" would have net positive outcomes on competition.

> how would it be different than antitrust enforcement?

I think the benefit of such an imaginary rule is that in your imagination it’d actually be enforced.

The metric of user share. Wouldn't enter antitrust territory if you somehow avoid acquiring more users. Limiting # of active accounts would be one way to enforce.

Difficult to know. It would have been difficult for them to make money without adding an ads team. Without making money it would have been difficult for them to create the infrastructure to process the large amounts of data and change that are a big part of how google search works these days. Would a two man company focused on search have created google maps or google earth? Probably not - gathering just the data for streetview was a pretty huge undertaking. Their geographic search capabilities would probably have been nonexistent.

Google acquired both Maps and Earth, they didn't create them.

That's interesting, but I don't think it diminishes the point - a two person company would have been pretty unlikely to acquire them, or stay two person if it did and needed to integrate them with their search product.

Agreed, but why should we care whether Google was able to acquire service X or Y?

(It's one of my pet peeves when people elide the massive amount of innovation that happens in small companies which then gets conglomerated under one of 5 massive brands.)

I'd argue that Google's one major innovation is the ad-supported free business model for most of these services. From a casual skim, it looks like most of the revenue for the company that built what became Earth was from the military. Google took that and made it "free" for regular people.

I chose those because I think maps and street view and to a lesser extent earth are meaningful improvements to the Google search experience that wouldn't have been available to a smaller company.

It would be like Dwarf Fortress

I suspect it would be substantially better. Less UX, more capability.