It's a mistake to use the "if it made business sense ... they would" line of thinking when interpreting the decision-making of any organization, especially larg

It's a mistake to use the "if it made business sense ... they would" line of thinking when interpreting the decision-making of any organization, especially large established ones. As Marc Andreessen has noted: "The behavior of any big company is largely inexplicable when viewed from the outside. I always laugh when someone says, "Microsoft is going to do X", or "Google is going to do Y", or "Yahoo is going to do Z". Odds are, nobody inside Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo knows what Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo is going to do in any given circumstance on any given issue. ... "The inside of any big company is a very, very complex system consisting of many thousands of people, of whom at least hundreds and probably thousands are executives who think they have some level of decision-making authority. On any given issue, many people inside the company are going to get some kind of vote on what happens -- maybe 8 people, maybe 10, 15, 20, sometimes many more. ... "You can count on there being a whole host of impinging forces that will affect the dynamic of decision-making on any issue at a big company. ... "You can't possibly even identify all the factors that will come to bear on a big company's decision, much less try to understand them, much less try to influence them very much at all." http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4jwZiwL41g0J:pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-startups-part-5-the-moby+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4jwZiwL...