My friends at ZDNet have another one of what I call "Business Week" stories about how big companies are fated to inherit the Earth.

This time the subject is Web 2.0. Jeff Clavier says that small innovators, like Jason Calacanis, are right to "flip" their companies now, because they're about to be crushed by GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft).

I have seen this story repeated endlessly the last decades, and looking at that list of "big powers" should put the lie to it. Microsoft is 30 years old, Yahoo 10, Google barely 5. Yet they're fated to succeed and smaller companies should get out of the way?

Having written this before, I don't just want to bitch about it again. I want to explain why I'm right.

It's true big companies can move quickly, act quickly, implement quickly, and throw lots of money at problems like Web 2.0 (which, after all, simply requires adapting database techniques to what folks want from the Web). The speed of action, and its scale, do not determine success or failure.

What determines it is often the speed of deciding.

Once any company achieves success, and becomes filled with successful people, the decision-making process naturally slows down. It has to. People must compete for resources, and a single management's attention, in order to get their projects priority.

Good ideas don't reach market quickly in this environment.

What works, what has always worked, is a clear focus on a single idea. Search, in Google's case. Software, in Microsoft's case. Alliances, in Yahoo's case.

Once the main goal has been reached, your speed of deciding on new goals is going to slow down. And decisions will never be final. If you break things down and set up "intra-preneurial" efforts, those groups will still compete for the resources and attention of top management. The decision in this case becomes one of setting a priority. That ends up taking time, process, and money.

The secret of business, as Jack Pallance's character Curly said in City Slickers, is always one thing. Figure out what that is and the rest is easy. Big companies, which have already done their thing, can't do this as well as small companies. It's the speed of deciding, and then constantly re-deciding, that slows them down.

Always has, and always will. It's where Microsoft, and Yahoo, and Google came from, It's where their successors will come from as well.