A healthy economy needs a balance of small and large businesses. Today's technology is making it easier to make incremental improvements to existing ideas, which are usually small businesses. This is a safer strategy and people could flock to it like they flock to safe corporate jobs today.
It becomes a problem when there is an imbalance. Many domains/markets are crowded. Today we have too many CMSs, fart apps, MVC frameworks etc.. At one point we had an abundance of word processors.
It wouldn't be healthy if every programmer tried to make his own word processor, progress in the domain would flat-line. It's only after the dust settled and people had time to think about the concept that we have some genuine innovation, like the no-distraction trend.
Too many small businesses in the same niche is just as bad as a monopoly if your goal is technological progress. The money is distributed differently of course, so if your goal is to create a healthy middle class, small business overcrowding is better than big business monopolies.
It's hard to judge what the right balance is. People working on ideas that don't scale don't crowd the space for ideas that do. Like all matters of complex systems, it's complicated. We won't get to the bottom of it with essays alone.
It becomes a problem when there is an imbalance. Many domains/markets are crowded. Today we have too many CMSs, fart apps, MVC frameworks etc.. At one point we had an abundance of word processors.
It wouldn't be healthy if every programmer tried to make his own word processor, progress in the domain would flat-line. It's only after the dust settled and people had time to think about the concept that we have some genuine innovation, like the no-distraction trend.
Too many small businesses in the same niche is just as bad as a monopoly if your goal is technological progress. The money is distributed differently of course, so if your goal is to create a healthy middle class, small business overcrowding is better than big business monopolies.
It's hard to judge what the right balance is. People working on ideas that don't scale don't crowd the space for ideas that do. Like all matters of complex systems, it's complicated. We won't get to the bottom of it with essays alone.