Sometimes, it’s useful to pause for a moment and look around to scan the environment. Of course, we help our clients do that all the time, because it’s a key part of the design process. But it’s not so often that we do it for ourselves.

When our developers got started in this business, the landscape consisted of a handful of big companies providing services on mainframes and a few types of microcomputer. Then the desktop computer revolution arrived, and things exploded. Some big companies failed or broke up (hello, Ma Bell and Unisys), and many smaller players came into the space.

When the Internet revolution happened a decade or so later, the process repeated. Today, with the ubiquity of the technology and the near-universal need for companies and brands to leverage web, mobile, and social technologies, demand is high. And so are the suppliers.

We recently conducted a more in-depth look at who (besides us) is providing quality services out there — and who, ahem, was providing less-good services, shall we say. The results were not too surprising, but remarkable nonetheless.

While there is still a coterie of small providers and one-person shops, the largest segment of the community is more the medium-sized agency (like Square Lines, really), combining anywhere from a few to a couple of dozen professionals in the company. At the larger end, there are relatively few companies of great size.

Given the lessons of history, it will be interesting to see what happens to this group. If (or, more likely, when) we come across the next disruptive technology, it seems likely that some of the bigger players (and perhaps a fair amount of the medium-sized ones) will be in trouble.

This is why keeping up with emerging technologies is such a big part of what we do, and why it is a big part of what other successful firms do as well. As the paths of the past tell us, those who don’t are destined to fail.