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Yegge's blog post rings true. I can't help but wonder if Google should split itself into many smaller companies -- effectively, having offspring. And I don't
by cs702 9y ago
Yegge's blog post rings true.
I can't help but wonder if Google should split itself into many smaller companies -- effectively, having offspring.
And I don't mean housing different business units into different legal entities, each with its own team. Google has already done that, in the form of Alphabet. I mean splitting each business unit into multiple equal-sized competing businesses. Imagine multiple smaller companies offering Google Drive, fighting each other for customers, improving the service in different ways over time, each with a different brand.
Perhaps corporate death and giving birth is the only way to avoid this kind of stagnation.
I realize this is a possibly controversial, non-orthodox idea. I'm only wondering.
- simonsarris 9y ago> Imagine multiple smaller companies offering Google Drive, fighting each other for customers If you haven't read about Google's myriad competing voice and chat applications and services, I have bad news...
- cs702 9y agoImagine assigning every Google Apps/Drive customer, say, to one of 10 bins, and then creating and spinning off 10 independent companies, each offering the same exact service (Gmail, calendar, contacts, docs), each one under a different brand, but powered by the same code. Over time, these 10 companies would be forced to innovate to compete with each other. In other words, take the successful business units, break them into smaller units with the same product and a similarly sized customer base, and release these offspring companies to the wild.
- pgodzin 9y agoThat sounds terrible for 9/10 of the customers that are forced to have a worse-than-possible experience.
- mavhc 9y agoEither they have to talk to each other, which means standards, which slows innovation, or everyone will switch to Office365 because they don't talk to each other
- cs702 9y agoAll users at each customer would go into the same bin, so inter-company collaboration would stay the same.
- joshuamorton 9y ago[Googler, I like to run with these examples]. Who manages the hardware and infra in this situation? Do all of these systems continue using the Google account you have with their tools running in Google's datacenters? Or do you now have 10 datacenters with 10 identity management tools and 10 different backend storage solutions that all need to be globally distributed and managed by teams of 5 or 10x as many total SREs to maintain the same level up uptime guarantee?
- cs702 9y agoI like to run with crazy ideas too, and sometimes I even come up with them :-) All good questions. Without doing a lot (a lot!) of work, I don't know what the "right" answers are for them. The motivating question for proposing this crazy idea is: would it result in less bureaucracy, less paralysis, less stagnation, more innovation? I don't know the answer to my motivating question either, but I'm wondering...