The fundamental forces of scale

Forces of scale make larger companies slower and harder to execute, but more effective when they are harnessed and leveraged. Two drivers explain this: rare events become common at scale, so 1,000 servers failing once every three years means a failure per day, and complex systems have interacting parts that exceed human comprehension. Robustness carries a cost, since a team of four is not four times as productive as a team of one, and a website made reliable with redundant servers, a shared database and a load balancer costs more than four times the original.