In the game of innovation, there is next to no time to rest. As soon as you’ve discovered the next, best thing, everyone in your industry starts trying to replicate it. In the best cases, it takes your competitors years to distill your secret sauce. In the worst cases, it only takes months to move from profitable differentiation to commodity competition. Scale economics has been one of the last bastions from the competitive storm. In other words, the advantages of size gave some companies a bit of safe harbor.