Very much agreed. When an organization becomes large it needs to make tough choices. In an organization built around product-centric teams, it may be easier t

Very much agreed. When an organization becomes large it needs to make tough choices. In an organization built around product-centric teams, it may be easier to release products more quickly and the average employee may perceive a smoother course from concept to execution, but the organization will quickly discover that horizontal changes become extremely difficult. The frustrated product developer who can't get products out is replaced by the frustrated operations guy who can't patch unsecure systems fast enough. Which one is worse? For Google, I would say the latter. While it always seems like a tragedy to hear about "great" products getting killed, pre-birth, in the corporate mill, I much prefer my stable, high uptime, browser-performant Google to a Google that releases way more product than it already does. Not to mention that most products (like most startups) fail. As a product-centric company, do you break teams apart after a product fails? If a product succeeds, do you take that successful team and move it to the other product? That may work if you're lucky enough to have a team with the proper skills balance (not to mention passion) to move across different products. What about career goals? People in a particular field tend to want to work with the best people in that field--a huge draw of working at Google is working with the best people in Field X. In a functional organization, the functions (almost) never go away--so the teams are stable. Of course, being on the outside I can't speak for the problems that are mentioned, such as in-fighting, lack of executive discipline ("You will not launch your product because I don't like your hair style, FUUUUUUUUU!"), etc., but those problems are bad regardless of organization type.