Re: consolidation

[Jari Arkko <jari.arkko@xxxxxxxxx>]

​That was the result of containerized transport rather than ​a political cataclysm.

IT companies tend to make the mistake that political circumstances are irrelevant to them. They are on the look out for emergent technologies.

Governments were not. Not only did HMG not understand the impact of containerization and fail to plan for it, they entirely failed to realize the impact until a decade after it had occurred. The cost of shipping goods dropped by two orders of magnitude because of the box. That is why it is now possible to build cars in the UK using parts from Japan.

Many policy makers have yet to catch up to the impact of containerization. They are cheerfully trying to rewrite the rules of the modern trading system while understanding exactly nothing about its workings. 

Containerization? For some reason your story brings to my mind some shifts in cloud computing and their ongoing effects in the industry :-)

Jari