I think it‘s kind of funny that there was an article today about Google‘s Pixel division being disjointed and not integrated enough with the Android division.
Maybe part of the reason for the publics perception of Google‘s teams and divisions seemingly operating in an independent and chaotic manner is a way of minimizing the attack surface for antitrust accusations.
Integration is hard. The amount of work to keep good integration between all services in a business grows as the square of the number of services. Missing “obvious” integrations is just a natural consequence of being large.
> The amount of work to keep good integration between all services in a business grows as the square of the number of services
That's true if each of the services directly integrates with each of the other services—or, more generally, if the number of integrations per service grows proportionally to the total number of services.
But the number of service interactions per service seems, IME, to increase sublinearly with number of services, and a decreasing marginal rate.
Even the effort of being on the lookout for whether two services should naturally integrate with each other scales superlinearly. Eventually you reach a point where most teams don't even know of the existence of most teams.
Maybe part of the reason for the publics perception of Google‘s teams and divisions seemingly operating in an independent and chaotic manner is a way of minimizing the attack surface for antitrust accusations.