My first job out of uni was for an oilfield services company around 2006-2008. I did another 12 months for them recently in 2013. It's an outrageously homogenized industry at almost every level, at least here in Australia: it seems that in earlier times, it wasn't so hard to make your small own oilfield startup. But nowadays oilfield-specific instrumentation vendors (and sensor manufacturers!) have largely been bought out and either shut-down or brought in-house by the bigger players.
A diverse set of contractors means you're all double-checking each other's work. I've also seen jobs where most of the services are provided turn-key from one main contractor (and we'd been brought in reluctantly due to availability problems). When everything from the rig, to the drilling fluids, bits, sat comms, wireline services, DST/production and so on are all provided by the one umbrella company there's a lot more copy-pasta going on and opportunity for errors to propagate [and never get noticed]...
It's a shame, Baker Hughes seems like it had a pretty phenomenal history.
You could be talking about so many industries of course. It seems as though economies of scale outweighs some of the issues you raise as the majority of major industries make this change over time.
Welcome to the land over regulation. Regulation in the public view is about protection of people and things where in the business world it really means, protected vested interest - as in established businesses who do not want competition. By making regulations onerous enough only the big can comply you pretty much stop the little guy from even trying
There are startups discussed here daily that run up against the regulatory wall, some make out okay, others no so well
A diverse set of contractors means you're all double-checking each other's work. I've also seen jobs where most of the services are provided turn-key from one main contractor (and we'd been brought in reluctantly due to availability problems). When everything from the rig, to the drilling fluids, bits, sat comms, wireline services, DST/production and so on are all provided by the one umbrella company there's a lot more copy-pasta going on and opportunity for errors to propagate [and never get noticed]...
It's a shame, Baker Hughes seems like it had a pretty phenomenal history.