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The whole "things must scale" made sense 20 or 10 years ago. But today there is so much competition and free capital. New business is lucky if it carves out small niche and turns profitable.

The same with hardware. We had tiny machines comparable to Raspberry Pi 4 hooked in cluster. Today you can rent single server with 24TB DDR RAM and countless SSDs.

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In the time since the dotcom boom, the magnitude of Metcalfe's Law has been argued.

Last I heard, the argument was that the effect for social networking was closer to nlogn than n^2. If true, then quadrupling in size may increase the value by some number of percentage points instead of an order of magnitude.

Which means 'big enough' may not be that big.

of course you could argue that this situation has only happened because things "above you" have scaled (up, by a lot).

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