Marc Andreessen remarked recently a propos the internet and the media, that most car companies didn’t emerge from horse carriage making.

Admittedly that summary misrepresents the long period of development of a whole host of automobile-related technologies: fuel processing, engine development, machine tools.

Reuters boss – and former lawyer – Tom Glocer has another take, that I would subscribe to:

When you think of innovations in the music industry like the original Napster or Kazaa or the phenomenal rise of YouTube, one understands why it is not Universal Music or NBC which blazes the trail.

In the content world, it must be admitted that a fair number of start-ups adopt a legal position that could be best described as “we will worry about copyright infringement when we are successful.” Indeed, that is precisely what is going on now as Google is regularizing YouTube’s content relationships.

Since I practised law for many years I offer this defence of my former colleagues: don’t blame the lawyers for once. If a product manager at NBC called upon the formidable GE legal department and presented a business plan that was based on ripping-off copyright until the service was so popular, fearful content owners would no longer complain, he would be laughed out of Fairfield.

Big companies with stringent compliance policies and now Sarbanes Oxley controls to attest to are just not going to take these risks. Nor should the junior product manager just not consult the lawyers for fear that he will get the “wrong answer.”

We must recognize that there are often legitimate structural reasons why most challenges to the established order come from outside the firm. This is also not a bad thing as it quite naturally serves as a check on the dominance of large organizations – perhaps far more effectively than antitrust policy.