I just had the pleasure of talking for a while about complex adaptive systems, and why small companies wither when big companies absort them. Don't misunderstand; I don't know much about CAS's, and I have no insights about the busines idea -- just some thoughts I've gathered from various places. You know, 'why would one company acquire another? What do they hope to get out of it?' And there are a fair number of buzzwords you can throw into the concept, but the basic idea is, to make the big company's earnings go up, either by just taking the earnings of the smaller company and tacking them onto the bigger company's (though not their debts, oh, no), or because the small company has a skill/ability/resource that the big one thinks would help its profit picture because now they'd have to pay less for the skill/ability/resource. Thats about it, nothing much more to say (unless you're, say, the Harvard Business Review.) But it was nice, for a while, to talk about them anyway. I don't often get that chance. I suppose that sounds arrogant. It's not meant to be.