Scale Doesn’t Scale

A nice rant from Jerry Jarvis on how decentralization of markets is changing the economics of competition. Here’s an excerpt:

: Scale doesn’t scale anymore.

The old days of big players in the economy collecting consumers, audience, distribution, manufacturing efficiency, buying power, or capital in the grip of centralized control are waning. That used to be the way to find efficiency and size. That used to be the way to scale.

But they are being foiled by our new distributed world. And they are being replaced by a more efficient means of finding size and efficiency.

Aggregation is the new scale.

He’s clearly on to something, but I am not sure that "aggregation" describes the essence of the new model.  JSB and I are starting to write about this, so we’ll have more to say on this shortly.  Jerry also is much more effective in discussing how customers are using aggregation to get more value out of vendors, but his few examples about how vendors can use aggregation aren’t nearly as satisfying.