The auto industry is far from a joyless place, engineers at AMG or BMW design products with the aim of fun, great design for the sake of it over economy is the only reason they exist.
I'd wager that the person administering databases at Citibank tends to have less fun during the day than somebody making a living developing apps for their own company, in much the same way that designing transmissions for a formula one team is more fun than designing transmissions at GM.
That the bigger an organisation gets the less fun it is, is the most important force driving start-up creation and there is still a far greater untapped frontier available to us than any other industry to date.
A middle class lifestyle is based upon the products that companies produce, not so much the jobs they provide. A house with a garden is within reach of the masses only if cars are affordable (ford model T ) a yearly holiday to a sunny location is only within reach of those same people if travel is affordable ( boeing 747 ).
The pressure put upon established jobs originates from technology at least as much as it does from outsourcing lower skilled labour to Asia or Latin America. The unemployment we are facing now is not the result of outsourcing but of the misallocation of resources. Besides, production follows consumption and much of the investment overseas is not in service to American consumers but aims to build up access to those markets.
Middle class Americans have access to more products and services than ever before, the biggest threat to a sustained middle class is a re-inflation of houseprices and a sustained political attack on free trade, not on the lack of foresight of the CEO's of mature organizations.
The decline of the empire and being whittled down to 'just our island' has coincided with the best possible time to be alive in britain, very far from being a disaster.
As for having the wrong culture for the modern world; the UK for all its flaws, is an open and creative society and has been so for many generations, more than the vast majority of societies worldwide. There's no good reason to believe that the brits won't keep on taking in and improving on the best ideas form around the world.
Can't the same be said of accountants or wall streeters? Top founders like Bazos, Jobs and Gates all seem to have pretty solid mariages; is the divorce rate higher for people who have tried to start a business or is it just an excuse for these tragedies that people of all walks of life have to contend with?
It has the same sort of feel as GEB, he riffs about cellular automata etc, its not too demanding while still giving enough to meditate on for a few days.
Suddenly elevated status! Two billion dollar companies and 20 years in the valley, is the rest of the world really that cut off to condescend like this?
You could look to China as an example; a country that has re-entered the world economy fairly abruptly and is looking to acquire raw materials.
They might follow their lead and do deals with countries like Australia, Canada and Russia or they could just acquire stock in corps like BHP Billiton or BP.
So it would boil down to stock trades and board meetings.
I don't have a business, just an office drone; but I have to find out about legal ownership of companies all the time, when our customers issue purchase orders we have to make sure that the names on the invoices we generate match them.
Changing the names in our CRM/ERP systems is a laborious process and we have to get the customer to sign legal documents confirming that all the software licenses owned by the previous company are now owned by the acquirer/new merger.
I think that a website containing all the name change documents, press releases and possibly a service that tracks legal ownership (though this could be hard to scale) could be worth pursuing, along the lines of a Duns and Bradstreet ( http://www.dnb.com ) type company.
It could be something like a more focused docstoc or perhaps a legal wolfram alpha.
The point is that the arrangement of bits might not be appropriate to copy; people have been writing poetry for millennia but when you need to write copy of a webpage or lay out a spreadsheet you have to write out new 'bits', you can't just tear out a page of Hamlet and hope that it does the job.
The auto industry is far from a joyless place, engineers at AMG or BMW design products with the aim of fun, great design for the sake of it over economy is the only reason they exist.
I'd wager that the person administering databases at Citibank tends to have less fun during the day than somebody making a living developing apps for their own company, in much the same way that designing transmissions for a formula one team is more fun than designing transmissions at GM.
That the bigger an organisation gets the less fun it is, is the most important force driving start-up creation and there is still a far greater untapped frontier available to us than any other industry to date.
The future is so fun its blinding ;)