How is ~420 acquisitions a year in a large industry amazing? Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Cisco probably average over 100 a year between them and they are unlikely to be 25% of the tech industry total. Simple's blog post, at least, doesn't say how many small banks existed in 1980 or 1998 so we have no idea how this changed the small bank landscape. Oddly it does say that the number of large banks declined by 50% but I bet a lot of that was taking over failing banks.