Notes on scale + quality

Artisanal software

In a speech delivered years ago, Ev Williams used agriculture as a metaphor to understand what’s possible on the Internet.

Agriculture was a tremendous invention – it got people fed and freed them to do many things. But agriculture – taken to the extreme in the pursuit of profit leads to a sick and obese population and industrial... See more

As anything scales too effectively - from fashion to restaurants to music - the market opens for more non-scalable alternatives. Once Starbucks opens on every block, many of us crave the artisanal coffee shop. Once our favorite Italian restaurant becomes a chain of three, we grow tired of it. Why? First, so much of what we buy and do is tied up in ... See more

So as organizations grow in scale, the result, as many of us feel intuitively, is the concomitant loss of creativity, flexibility, curiousity, and humanity. Mega scale organizations are not, generally speaking, very nice places to work at, shop at, or do business with, are they? That is why they are always fighting their very own inertia. Like any ... See more

Scale is quite valuable, but the costs are usually hidden. Consolidation leads to monoculture, it reduces the stock of unique ferments. Culture, taste, and invention are often bottom-up phenomena. They require the opposite of scale. They require distance, and working alone.