I don't think it's necessarily that bad when there's a single large company that dominates a space. from a user's perspective, google search is probably better than any alternative involving four or five competitors on equal footing. some things scale really well.

more of a problem is when one company is a big player in several horizontal markets, creating an opportunity to take over new markets with a mediocre offering.

These companies are as much funds as they are companies, should there be a limit on capital pooling?

TBH, I think it might be good to put limits on company types i.e. what type of business a company can do at a certain scale; and very different rules for large vs small companies in general (and maybe private/low-majority-shareholder-count versus public corps) - that way a tech company can just go into another industry and dominate on the basis of better funding alone.

I'd also really like to see product based shares/corp-ownership; where ip, copyright etc for a product are held only by a co-op that issues shares/agreements with associated partners companies. That way instead of having a corp first, with its product to support it; you could have a product first, with a company to support it.

From what I've seen the big companies just stink at chat period, so they go in buy a chat company, ruin the product and someone else moves into the space and starts taking market share again.

Examples include

AIM

Skype

Slack

and now Discord

Or the chat product space is just constantly evolving, so older platforms inevitably get left behind after radically new ones pop up.

I don't think that companies are bad at making chat. I think that chat is difficult to make profitable to maintain.

It would be interesting to have limits on size. Something like a max of 1 million users.

Optimistically, it would result in all applications being federated and there being a multitude of hosting platforms to choose from.

Or Microsoft would sell Teams server software to hosting companies with strict requirements like not allowing connections to competing products. Or just slightly alter the existing O365 reseller model..."We don't have 100 million users, we have 100 users (resellers) who each have sold 1 million licenses."

> Sometimes I wonder if the world would be better or worse if there was a max size for companies.

when there's a will there's a way. the companies that want to grow that badly will find a way to evade such restictions like they do to taxes, they'll probably call it something like organisational structure optimization.