[talltimtom]

Microsoft is gigantic, they loose absolutely nothing by competing against themselves.

People get caught up in the on-size-fits-all mentality. If you are a 20 man start-up it’s stupid to make 3 separate solutions that all compete. When you employ north of a hundred thousand people, it’s less of an issue.

[usrusr]

From a certain size onwards not competing against yourself seems to be almost irresponsible. Just imagine the fate Intel without any internal competition to the Itanium, or without the Haifa team that insisted on pitting a refined P6 against netburst for mobile.

[jkchu]

Totally agree with this. I've heard Amazon does similar things, like multiple teams competing with each other to accomplish similar goals. Can be very healthy for the company if managed correctly.

[reitanqild]

Google seems to take this to an extreme with a number of messaging clients competing all the time.

[iamdave]

That particular example, I'm not even sure if it's an issue of teams competing for the king of the messaging hill. And it's of particular interest to me as a developer who works in the messaging space.

It's not hard to get right, it's not difficult to get wrong either-everyone has their spin on messaging and that kind of choice is perfectly fine. We don't need one to rule them all, at least IMO.

But goodness gracious Google just seems to have NO clue what they're doing with messaging. Which is frustrating because in the sliver of time they got it right, they got it right (that time when Hangouts was actually kind of great, it was well integrated, and looked like Google was actually trying to make it better? Member those days?) and then-as expected-they stripped the car for parts and we ended up with two communications (Duo and Allo) platforms that really should have been one feature-rich solution.