The Big Bang Business Cycle

It seems to me there is a cycle in big companies that they go from consolidated to diversified. The cycle is someone gets the idea that pushing authority down into business units or divisions will make smaller units more responsive and (in todays jargon) agile. Then in a few years, all the divisions are fighting with one another and someone reigns the divisions in and consolidates power. I've lived through a cycle of this and it is 'interesting'.

I've also lived through this in computing. College computing was the big mainframe where I submitted cards to be run on the central computer. When I got a job, minicomputers were all the rage. People all over the city shared a computer and did their work at their offices, connected by modems. It was called timesharing. One expensive computer held data from many entities. In my case, it was accounting data from small businesses all over the area.r

Then the Personal Computer arrived and computer power was centralized but in much smaller sized companies.  The PC - and here I mean the IBM PC and its clones - decentralized computer power, yet it also consolidated it as PCs were connected back to those mainframes and minicomputers. Computers spread to every part of business.

As big companies built their computer departments, first called MIS, then IS, then IT, they developed applications or bought them to run on their own machines. Companies guarded their information.

Then fledgling networks started up - Tymshare, Compuserve, etc. - and information could flow into companies. Satellite data networks came along but were still one way. Information flowing into companies.

Then the Internet hit the big time and information could flow both ways. We'll skip this part since you should know all about it's phenominal growth and various security issues. That's not my point.

Now we're back to timeshare. Everyone puts their data in 'the cloud' which is just a bunch of individual 'timesharing' computers.