Seth Godin writes:
Im writing this on a laptop at a skateboard park that added wifi for parents. Because they wanted to. It took them a few minutes and $50. No big meetings, corporate policies or feasibility studies. They just did it.
Today, little companies often make more money than big companies. Little churches grow faster than worldwide ones. Little jets are way faster (door to door) than big ones.
Today, Craigslist (18 employees) is the fourth most visited site according to some measures. They are partly owned by eBay (more than 4,000 employees) which hopes to stay in the same league, traffic-wise. Theyre certainly not growing nearly as fast.
Small means the founder makes a far greater percentage of the customer interactions. Small means the founder is close to the decisions that matter and can make them, quickly.
Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs.
Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.
Small means that you can answer email from your customers.
Jeff Jarvis adds:
I’ve been trying to figure this out for sometime: On the one hand, things in our world are getting bigger: Walmart… media conglomerates… Dell… merged airlines… megachurches… Home Depot… merged banks… Microsoft…
But on the other hand, things are getting smaller: The empowered individual can create a media company, using blog software; create a manufacturing company, using somebody else’s factory and somebody else’s distribution; create a multinational enterprise, using nothing more than a Skype line.
I wondered whether small was just a trend or a new organizing principle for the business world. I now think it could be the latter. Small won’t replace big, of course, but small will add up to considerable new competition. And that is because small can now succeed. The economies of scale must compete with the economies of small.
