[stingraycharles]

To turn this in a more broad discussion, are there any examples of “great” corporate structures for tech firms that scale well? Google has its problems (unwanted side effect being abandoned projects because of how they promote internally), I’ve heard quite a few bad things about Netflix as well. Apple and Microsoft seem to be faring quite well in this regard?

[wegs]

Last I looked, Microsoft's culture was toxic -- much more so than Amazon, Google, or most any other major tech organization. A ton of in-fighting, and decisions made for political reasons. They were working hard to clean it up, but I'm not sure how far they got.

Organizational design is a complex problem. It's like finding a great employee or a great spouse. They don't exist; it's a question of fit-to-function. Linus Torvalds would be a lousy doctor, and my doctor would be a lousy programmer. You really can't get everything. If you try, you fail. It's a question of aligning organizational structures to what you're trying to do. If you're running a sweatshop in India like a corporate R&D lab, or vice-versa, you're gonna fail.

I would argue Amazon has a great corporate structure which scales well for the purpose it's designed for. Amazon has been winning for alignment to profit/growth, for innovation, for customer-focus, and loses on the employee sweatshop front. That ain't bad. I think it's cracking a bit under COVID19, but at least for two decades, it's done really well for both customers and growth.

Google was a great org structure for its first decade, and then grew complacent in hiring, and when bad employees came in, it started failing in virtually everything else; I'm not sure it's coming back, but I hope it does. For now, it's been sailing on its (very significant) momentum, but that eventually wears off. It doesn't seem to have the right executive team in place anymore, though, so I'm not sure how it might come back.