What influence does Vanguard or Blackrock have in corporate governance? They’re just vehicles for old peoples’ retirement funds. They’re not polling strings in corporate mergers.

Consolidation over the last 30 years is the fault of folks here on HN. Information technology moves the equilibrium point between economies of scale and diseconomies of scale. It enables huge companies to operate efficiently. That enables them to leverage their scale to deliver better services and cheaper prices.

Consider Amazon. Everyone loves to hate on Amazon, but they’re doing it while adding stuff to the delivery they already have coming tomorrow. Why can Amazon ship me stuff overnight, whereas it used to take a week back in the 1990s? It’s not the internet per se. You could call in or fax orders back in the day—it still took a week. And delivery is being done using the same planes and trucks we have been using for decades. Amazon happened because technology enabled it to completely restructure the entire warehousing and delivery vertical, rendering a huge swath of the economy obsolete.

That’s happening all over the place. Most of these mom and pop businesses suck. They have shitty service, high prices, limited selection, etc. The big companies are better and IT enables them to scale in ways that were impossible before.

> The big companies are better and IT enables them to scale in ways that were impossible before.

It makes sense. Ideally the big companies are able to merge into a kind of super-conglomerate (heavily vertically and horizontally integrated) so that economies of scale can really come into effect and provide value for the consumer.

Likely this is the trajectory that we are on anyway given that US regulatory posture seems to be okay with it. The only sad part is that as companies get larger, they tend to have more and more boring names. So a heavily integrated large multinational will eventually end up having a name like Omni Consumer Products because they are doing so many different things at the same time.