Response to the Symposium: Framing Business History

Abstract

The contribution by Richard Langlois essentially supports my approach. Naomi Lamoreaux, Dan Raff, and Peter Temin (LRT) disagree in terms of economic theory. Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, again in terms of economic theory, disagree with both Langlois and LRT on the creation of the New Economy. I begin my comments by challenging Langlois's statement that quarter century later, however, the firm no longer domi nates the landscape. It is under siege from a panoply of decentralized and market-like forms (p. 355}. This statement is echoed by the other contributors, but it violates historical realities. As the new preface to Inventing the Electronic Century indicates, the information revolution that created today's New Economy was carried out by enterprises as large as those that created the earlier industrial revolution. RCA commercialized the new audio and video technology. After RCA destroyed itself in the 1960s and 1970s through unrelated diver sification, Japanese giants, Sony, Matshushita, Sanyo, (split off from Matshushita), and Sharp fully dominated the American, European, and the rest of the world's markets in a way that the Chandlerian com panies in the industrial revolution never did. (For example, Ford only achieved 50 percent of the U.S. market in one year, 1920}. So, too, in information technology (IT}, IBM had dominated the information-processing industry from its beginnings in 1912. This dominance increased once it completed the conversion from the