Why are centralized businesses doomed to fail? It’s been the primary organizational mode for the last 10,000 years.
For most of human history, most businesses were small ma and pa shops operated by a few local people. These days large business chains are the norm. You could say that centralized big business killed the decentralized small ma and pa shops.
If https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_international_trad... is right, the necessary technology for international trade was not available before 4000 BCE (horse riding ~3700 BCE, long-distance sea travel ~2000 BCE).
How would smaller companies do better?
For every gmail, how many independent email providers do you think exist out there?
Why would you choose to not pay for the big tech products and then pay for a smaller version?
Smaller companies and ISVs, on the other hand, will be better off if their market is commoditized. They won't have to spend so much to compete in R&D, they just need to find each the best way to serve their (comparatively) small customer base.
One is that centralized _business_ has certainly not been the primary organizational mode. You can talk about centralized _government_ (of whatever variety you'd like), but the distinction there is that the centralized government had some sense of itself in an ecosystem - a citizenry, a land, a future, etc. - and businesses do not.
The second is that centralized entities sure wrote a bunch of stuff _down_, but it's hard to say they were the primary organizational mode for any but the last 50-200 years - the reach of serious centralized bureaucracies has only really begun to match their propaganda in the industrial and now computer age. Until extremely recently, the actual effective reach of a centralized bureaucracy was a day's horseback ride - control degrades rapidly as one leaves the core. "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away", as the saying goes.
Edit: With regards to the second note, "Against the Grain" by James C. Scott is a solid read.
If you own a company and want it to last through the ages and you aren't literally the only guy in town, never become number one. Aim high, but don't hit the top.
The same can be said for countries and practically any organization or group. You stay an underdog if you do not want to ever fail.
That leads to complacency, corruption, and delusion, ultimately leading to failure.
Everyone and everything from mundane individuals to megacorporations and empires have all fallen from grace once they became top dog. No exceptions.
If you want to last, aim high but don't become top dog.