> What is that magic wellspring of value that year after year creates these huge opportunities out of nowhere?
Complexity is unidirectional. People move on, rationale is lost, and increasingly the bulk of institutional knowledge grows to be dogma. We do it this way because we've always done it this way.
Additionally, head counts don't naturally go down, people don't automate themselves out of a job and neither do they take kindly to being automated. Change becomes bad.
> Lets imagine, for a second, a time traveler from the future appears in front of Bill Gates in 1999 and utters something like: “I’m from the future! You should sell keywords to match search queries!”"
I am sure there were people within Microsoft who said that very thing around 1999. Also, Google employees lobbied for a social networking product to Larry & Sergey in 2003 and the result was Orkut.
The reason Microsoft didn't rise up to the occasion and grow to dominate search and Google did not seize the social opportunity the first go around is not because these things were unknowable to them under the formalized systems that governed their businesses at the time as the author suggests.
It is not a lack of information. It is more Kafkaesque. Employees had the knowledge and couldn't freely execute on it -- organizational complexity kills joy.
The advantages of working for a large corporation evaporate when you want to work on a risky new idea outside of the company wheelhouse. If anything, they becomes disadvantages.
You are just as likely to succeed independently, have more fun doing it, and keep much more of the windfall. So why not jump ship?