I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin but his most recent blog post is just really, really dumb:

I was in Detroit last week… I have family there. I also drive a car. And I would rather that the world doesn’t melt and the economy thrive. So I’m uniquely qualified to weigh in on the automobile industry.

Not only should Congress encourage/facilitate the organized bankruptcy of the Big Three, but it should also make it easy for them to be replaced by 500 new car companies.

Or perhaps a thousand.

The reason there was 1000 car companies in the very early days of automobiles was because it’s very easy to make a shitty car. Fortunately for them, everyone around them was making shitty cars as well and they could compete on the marketplace. Nowadays, it’s equally as easy to make a shitty car but everyone else is making awesome cars and so the only way to compete is to make awesome cars as well.

This is an established pattern in many industries: there is an initial burst of anarchy and creativity with many different ideas and paradigms being explored until the product gets to a sufficient level of complexity such that it essentially locks out new entrants to the field. From then on, only established players have the resources to compete and the rate of new ideas drops dramatically. There used to be a dozen CPU makers, a dozen airplane makers and a dozen operating system vendors. Now, there’s only two, two and three respectively.