Life becomes more difficult the bigger companies get regardless of outside pressures. Price's law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work. This means the number of "useful" people increases linearly with size but the number of not-so-useful people increases exponentially. If you have 10 people, 3 do half the work. If you have 100 people, 10 do half the work. Google has 60k employees, so about 250 people are getting half the work done. This is basically impossible to maintain and is part of the reason megacorps die.
> Price's law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work. This means the number of "useful" people increases linearly with size but the number of not-so-useful people increases exponentially.
Assuming you mean that the smaller group accomplishing half the work is "useful" and the larger group also accomplishing half the work is "not useful", it certainly doesn't mean that.
It means, very clearly, that the number of "not useful" people increases linearly with size, and the number of "useful" people increases sublinearly. But even if your definition of "size" included only useful people, x^2 is a polynomial function of x, not an exponential function of it.
One of the things I love about HN is that people get really pedantic about things like math terms used in casual conversation. That's not sarcasm, I actually do love it. Thanks for increasing the specificity of the language.
