When The Facebook started designing their own servers (which, by the way, have lots of switch-mode power supplies in them, and always have) the game they were playing was "be a better MySpace". They were running a bunch of PHP pages. At the time you could have made the same argument about The Facebook vs. Rackspace: "While Facebook would be hiring ordinary IT employees to work in a standard datacenter in a cheap business park, Rackspace could be hiring datacenter workers to work with Rackspace's BGP peering connecting their worldwide datacenters."

But The Facebook decided to make informatics their core competency, to the point of building their own servers with 12 volts running to the rack, same as Google before them.

There were surely industrial companies in 01922 who decided that management wasn't their core competency (though they used different words), and if they needed help with management they'd contract out to management specialists like Taylor or Gilbreth. They met the same fate that will meet companies today that decide that informatics isn't their core competency.