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> Imagine multiple smaller companies offering Google Drive, fighting each other for customers If you haven't read about Google's myriad competing voice and ch

> 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 ago
Imagine 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 ago
  That sounds terrible for 9/10 of the customers that are forced to have a worse-than-possible experience.
  - cs702 9y ago
    All customers would have the same exact service on day one.
    - pgodzin 9y ago
      Sure, but not after that. And presumably it would be non-trivial to move your data to another fork that you like better.
- mavhc 9y ago
  Either 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 ago
    All 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 ago
    I 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...

cs702 9y ago

Imagine 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 ago
That sounds terrible for 9/10 of the customers that are forced to have a worse-than-possible experience.
- cs702 9y ago
  All customers would have the same exact service on day one.
  - pgodzin 9y ago
    Sure, but not after that. And presumably it would be non-trivial to move your data to another fork that you like better.
mavhc 9y ago
Either 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 ago
  All 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 ago
  I 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...