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Microsoft was famous for its internal competitions between engineering orgs: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&refe

• quanticle 10y ago
  Emphasis on was. It seems like these days Microsoft is moving towards more internal collaboration, with their "One Microsoft" initiative. They've found that greater focus on common, standard tools used across the entire company is better than having a bunch of teams, each rolling their own version of a given tool. More to the point, isn't this exactly what Steve Jobs advised Larry Page not to do? Steve Jobs said, famously, to put "more wood behind fewer arrows". And for a while, it seems like the advice was sticking - Google shuttered a bunch of products (for better or for worse) and seemed to be buckling down to focus on the search and YouTube division. But now it seems like Google is going right back to how it used to be - many teams, working on many products, with no guarantee of ongoing development or support. It seems to me that Google is turning into the next Cisco.