Monolith!

Monoliths are a concept that underlies debates about monopolies, monolithic software architectures and vertical integration, defined as systems that are hard or impossible to decompose into reusable parts. The article proposes two tests: whether disassembly and reassembly can be done with little loss, and whether a system can ignore its environment and its competitors' moves, as a dominant player in a game can. Standard Oil was not very monolithic because it could be broken up and reassembled with little loss, while modern firms such as Google, Meta and Amazon are harder to take apart. The article also says x86 chip dominance and Nvidia's CUDA software show monolithic behavior, since rivals must fit around them.