A great example of Conway's law is Active Directory. Someone at Microsoft figured out that they needed a) new authentication technology (Kerberos, which was ne

A great example of Conway's law is Active Directory. Someone at Microsoft figured out that they needed a) new authentication technology (Kerberos, which was new in the sense of "better than NTLM"), b) a general-purpose directory that (a) could use, c) also a general-purpose directory that could be used to serve DNS. What's surprising is that this then led MSFT to create a team to do all three things rather than have disparate, far-flung teams to do it. AD was a huge reason for MSFT's success in the oughts, and still is. The competition completely failed to see the advantage of that approach, and so failed to compete. At Sun Microsystems, for example, the directory server team was very far-flung from the Solaris Security team that owned Kerberos support, and neither had anything to do with DNS in any Sun products, and Sun never did anything about that in part because Solaris was seen as a cost center while the Directory Server product was seen as a profit center.