
Death and transfiguration: golden age of the corporation may be coming to an end - prostoalex
http://economist.com/news/business/21665073-golden-age-western-corporation-may-be-coming-end-death-and-transfiguration?cid1=cust/ednew/n/n/n/20150917n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/NA/email
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kfk
_> The cult of quarterly earnings may lose more of its following_

I'd love to see that. But still you need to make money in the near term and
once you start making money, you have to keep making money, that's where the
quarterly earnings cult is coming from. If your topline falls for 3 quarters
in a row and you have no incredible new strategies to make it grow again soon,
of course investors get worried.

Finally, it's not fair to compare corporations like GE, that makes most money
producing stuff in plants ww, with Facebook, that makes money running a
glorified web app. Those are 2 completely different worlds, even though some
of the problems Corporate is facing are the same (capital allocation being the
1 concern of both type of companies).

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PhilWright
I love the characterization of Facebook as 'a glorified web app'.

This is true, but only in the sense that a Ford motor car is a wheeled widget.
Or maybe the Apollo capsule was just a flying tin box.

I don't use Facebook myself but I can still appreciate that running a web
application that scales to the level of Facebook is at least as hard as
designing and building cars or other factory produced widgets.

They handle over a billion different users in a month with a mind boggling
scale of user graph interconnection. They handle the uploading of hundreds of
millions of photos per day and manage to keep it all working when much of the
site is written in PHP.

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kfk
Sure, but making stuff at the scale of GE or a big car maker is much more
involved. First, if you make a mistake people can die, both due to faulty
products or faulty plant processes. Second, you are dealing with thousands of
stakeholders, including thousands of suppliers. Third you might be dealing
with thousands of products, try keep that as efficient as possible is as hard
as running a web service for 1 bl users.

What I am trying to say is that big Corp are still very good at efficiently
organizing certain type of processes, on which then companies like fb depend
on (servers, etc.).

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batbomb
It'd be interesting to know if the author is a John Fahey fan:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transfiguration_of_Blind_J...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transfiguration_of_Blind_Joe_Death)

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cperciva
I think it's far more likely that the author is a Strauss fan:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_Transfiguration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_Transfiguration)

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m0llusk
Ribbonfarm covered this better and in greater detail in A Brief History of the
Corporation: 1600 to 2100 [http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-
history-of-the-...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-
the-corporation-1600-to-2100/)

