A lifetime ago, I worked for Yahoo! well after Google had won the war. That office was full of talented, thoughtful, and energetic PMs...and a middle-management

A lifetime ago, I worked for Yahoo! well after Google had won the war. That office was full of talented, thoughtful, and energetic PMs...and a middle-management layer so thick that nothing ever got done. You'd propose new ideas, new products, new interfaces and it would just get so bogged down in the process. And invariably those talented people would leave for greener pastures, leaving behind those who were just there for a paycheck or because that was the best they could do, and things got incrementally worse. Lots of excuses were made: our users don't like change, we need to hit quarterly numbers, have we thoroughly tested this, and on and on. And what happens? You get something that looks Yahoo! Mail. It happened to AOL, it happened to Yahoo!, it's happening currently to Google, and will happen to Facebook, Twitter, and so on.