Originally posted by dadipentak 
Should we start a
Arg, no! Pentax is doomed!!!!! thread?
What, another one?
Meanwhile, I recently came across an article in CITY JOURNAL about PHYSICIST SOLVES THE CITY or some such. Said retired astrophysicist has written seminal papers about biological scaling and other non-astrophysical stuff, including the scaling and dynamics of human urban assemblages. And now he's gone on to look at corporations.
A fact emerges: Cities can last a long long time. Corporations rarely survive longer than 50 years. Why? Because cities are naturally anarchic places fed by human dynamics. Does your mayor "run" your city? Ha. But corporations are run top-down, and often lack the flexibility to adjust adequately to changing environments. Let's say a business is a success, expands, generates bookoo money -- at some point, it overloads. The efficiency of scale is swamped by the inefficiency of bureaucracy, the niggling of bean-counters. The "Rule of 1000" takes over -- any organization with over 1000 personnel generates enough internal communications that it no longer needs to retain contact with the real world.
Every business corporation dies, eventually. (Anyone remember Studebaker, PanAm, Exxon, Chicken Delight?) Most die within a generation. Few survive past 50 years. Asahi (Pentax) has been around since 1919 -- slightly younger than Nikon (1917), older than Canon (1937) and that upstart pipsqueak Sony (1946). OK, so Pentax died and was devoured by Hoya in 2008. But it still beat the odds.
"Ha", indeed!
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