I think you're probably right. I've seen it work at small companies. What it doesn't do is scale to large companies, which is the heuristic most growing companies use for any decision. You'd have to say "we'll grow no larger than our flat structure can sustain, even if it costs us billions," and who is going to do that? Not saying it's a good thing, in fact the opposite — optimizing for scale is the source of many of our woes as an industry, in my grumpy opinion.