Number of Firms by Employment Size of the Enterprise

Here's a cleaned up data set that graphs properly: http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/datasets/number-...

and Here's a visualization using the time-treemap to compare sector growth: http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/t...

and here's a stacked area graph that shows it all at once, although it's not as nice for comparison purposes: http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/u...

These statistics are relevant to Paul Graham's recent essay. They show that the number of firms with large numbers of employees is growing faster than the number with small numbers of employees. The years covered by the data are 1988-2001; it would be better to have more recent data, and also to have data broken down by field. It's possible that the US Census Office (which is the source of these data) has more recent figures, but I haven't checked.

With these limitations understood, the data here still contradict the essay's assumption that there is a trend toward smaller companies.

Shame that this seems to confuse many-eyes' visualizations. This would be perfect for their time-treemap, if it could pivot the data correctly.

Edit: Looks like the numbers were just uploaded in a non-standard way, i'm going to remove the ticks and reupload